Bridge Day
by Julia456
Summary: It's wild, it's wonderful, it's 400 people jumping off a bridge! Yup, Team Steel is gonna take West Virginia by storm! ... or is that the other way around...?
1. Prologue: Uncommon Sense

Disclaimer haiku: I wouldn't jump off/ A bridge if you paid me, but/ It looks like big fun.

Note: I love West Virginia. I've spent roughly the last four years trying to figure out a way to write a fic set in the state, and now I have, so hurrah! I've never been to a Bridge Day, alas, but I _have_ been to the bridge itself. Plus my new life goal is to go to Bridge Day 2004. If I do, expect a revised version of this fic. :)

This fic also happens to be set after the third season, wherein - as you might recall - Max and friends became professional extreme athletes.

Finally, this story is dedicated to my WV relatives, who graciously provided first-hand accounts of certain story aspects, and the WVU Mountaineers, whose football team continues to inspire my devotion despite their overall lack of winning. Go 'Eers!

* * *

For the benefit of his friends, Berto read the most alarming part aloud: " 'The rapids are imposing and forceful, many of them obstructed by large boulders which necessitate maneuvering in very powerful currents, crosscurrents, and hydraulics. Some rapids contain hazardous undercut rocks. Although the gradient is a modest twenty feet per mile, the rapids are of the full-grown West Virginia variety: big, brawny, and bodacious!' "

He looked up from his laptop only to see that neither of them were fazed. Nor were they stopping in their activities - namely, preparing their kayaks for their imminent launch on the New River. He was not going with them, partly because he had no desire to drown in a freezing mountain river, and partly because _someone_ had to man N-Tek's booth at the Bridge Day trade show.

Berto had already pointed out that a two-person expedition was almost as stupid as going solo, but they had made up their minds. Moments like this reinforced his opinion that he was the only member of Team Steel with any common sense whatsoever.

"Now, _that's_ what I'm talking about," Kat said, busy strapping something inside her kayak. "It's just too bad Gauley Season is over. Those Class V rapids are supposed to be _primo_."

Gauley Season was an annual event - twenty days of controlled flooding of the Gauley River as the Summersville Reservoir was drawn down to accommodate snowmelt. In those twenty days, the river went from being so-so to being one of the most challenging whitewater runs in the world.

Team Steel had missed it by barely a week, for which Berto was eternally grateful.

At Kat's announcement, Josh did pause. He rested his hands on the table covered with their gear and said, slightly patronizing, "Bro, we're sticking to the middle stretch. Those rapids only get up to Class III. Baby stuff. And if it starts looking ugly, we'll get out and walk around. I don't know about Kat, but I don't really want to be _limping_ into Bridge Day."

Kat gave Berto a grin and a wink. "Yeah, who wants to jump off a bridge with a broken leg?"

"Exactly." Josh went back to getting ready.

"Who wants to jump off a bridge in the first place?" Berto asked, shutting his computer. The question was entirely rhetorical, since the answer was as painfully obvious as the glassy water a stone's throw away.

Both Josh and Kat raised their hands, and then Josh asked, "Wait - with or without a parachute?"

"Not funny, _hermano_." Berto adjusted his glasses, fully aware that he was preaching to the wrong crowd; some things just had to be said. "But think about it: In two days, four hundred people are going to jump off of a perfectly good bridge. Just like skydivers jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Why?"

"Because," Kat said, straightening and wiping her hands off on her jeans. "It's _there_."

"Sounds right to me," Josh said cheerfully. "You ready, Ryan?"

Kat was already going inside the van. "Just gotta change."

"Don't take forever," Josh called after her. He was already wearing a wetsuit, backpack and safety gear - had been since before they'd left Fayetteville for their put-in a few miles north of Hinton.

Berto just sighed. It was a lost cause. His friends were always going to do needlessly dangerous things, and he was always going to be on the sidelines or hanging as far back from the action as possible. It had bothered him for a long time - there was a lot of insecurity when you were the odd man out - but eventually, he'd gotten over it. Not everyone was a secret-agent-turned- extreme-athlete. Some people were geniuses-turned-secret-agents-turned-team-managers. That was cool too.

Josh picked up his kayak, lugging it towards the river even as he asked Berto, "This is really bugging you, isn't it?"

Berto met the question with a question. "Do you know what the local Native Americans called this river?"

Josh shook his head.

He'd gotten the trivia off of another website, and he'd been saving it for a last-ditch bout of reasoning. Since _that_ wouldn't work, he might as well use it now. " 'The River of Death.' "

Josh set the kayak down in the gravel at the water's edge and said, "As long as it's not 'The River of Former Dread Minions,' I think we'll be okay."

"Oh, the worst-case scenario. Reassuring."

"Luckily, this isn't exactly Psycho's usual hunting ground. Or Vitriol's. Biocon, maybe." Josh trudged back to the van. "But I could take 'em."

"Just remember that the portable transphasic regenerator isn't making the trip with you," Berto warned. It was possibly the most precious item of hardware they had, and he had adamantly refused to send it on a whitewater trip. If it was destroyed, he wasn't sure he could build another one fast enough - or at all. He didn't have N-Tek's spy budget anymore. "And I won't be able to watch the biolink 24/7."

Josh didn't seem nearly as concerned about it as he should have been. He waved Berto off and banged on the van's door. "Kat! We're burning daylight!"

"Daylight" was an optimistic way to put it. The sun had just begun to creep over the mountains, and the mountains, being part of the Appalachian chain and therefore among the oldest and most eroded in the world, weren't exactly towering.

Her response was muffled but decidedly annoyed: "Hold ON!"

She emerged a second later, kicking the door open and practically knocking Josh down. "Jeez! Have you _tried_ to put on a full-body wetsuit in under a minute?"

"No," Josh said. He grabbed a few more things from inside the van, food included, and headed for the water. "Bro, clean up at the trade show for us."

"And save us a spot on the bridge," Kat added, following him and tugging on her lifejacket and helmet as she went. They were both in the river before Berto could do anything more than say goodbye and good luck.

He watched them go, steering their respective crafts with confident expertise.

Two days, a few dozen miles, Class III rapids, rock-climbing, potential life-or-death situations if one of the bad guys showed... which they did with alarming frequency. And then, if Josh and Kat made it back intact, they'd immediately jump 876 feet, straight down, from the New River Gorge Bridge.

"I'm the only one with common sense," Berto said to the empty West Virginian air, and went back to the van.


	2. A Worser Fate

Note: For the rest of this fic, we (as in, you, the gentle reader, and I, the hapless writer) shall be burdened by the presence of several canonical one-shot characters, the first batch of whom you might remember from the Season Three episode "Survival Instinct." In case you don't have that one memorized, a brief recap: Shrill, unlikeable, and arrogant Ethan Raptor got himself and Max trapped by an avalanche. Ethan's teammate Trip Thompson, plus Kat, went looking for them. Berto's timely arrival with the helifoil saved the day and Max did not, in fact, die of exposure and/or power failure as had been feared. Nor did he kill Ethan, which I for one would have heartily supported. It's a fun little ep in its own way, and has possibly the only instance of someone (Carlie Hoffman, Ethan's manager) flirting with Berto. Yeah... that last part's important, gentle reader. :)  
  
------  
  
The water was cold, although the weather wasn't bad; it was unseasonably warm for October, and the temperature rose steadily with the sun. It would top out at a comfortable seventy-three degrees Farenheit later in the day, if the weatherman was right.   
  
The mountains, which looked more like hefty foothills to a jaded West Coast eye, sat impassively on either side of the river. The leaves on the trees were mostly fall colors, mixing brown, red, orange and yellow with abandon. And there were a _lot_ of trees. What mountainside wasn't covered by foliage was sheer, naked rock face - odd patches of gray in the riot of color. The CSX railroad, with its coal-stained tracks and rusting metal, was a constant presence to the right. So far, no trains had gone by.   
  
For the most part, it had just been them, the railroad, and the mountains, but every now and then they floated past a wide spot in the vallet floodplain that had been filled with small and huddled towns. Somehow all of the buildings, houses and businesses alike, managed to look old and worn and tired.  
  
Josh was keeping his pace delibrately slow to prolong the fun. It also made it easier to talk.  
  
"Man, if this weather keeps up, it's going to be gorgeous on Bridge Day," Kat saying, holding even with him about a yard away. Her voice was flattened by the river and echoed slightly off the distant, water-rounded rocks on either side.  
  
"I'm still shocked that Dad signed us up." Lift, dip, stroke. A nice, easy rhythm on a nice, easy stretch of water. In the distance, the calm green-brown surface of the river took on a white-flecked appearance - rapids, but still far away. "I remember how much he freaked when I told him I was taking up BASE jumping."  
  
But Josh was pleased that he had, for a couple of reasons: because it made him a better spy and, currently, because only a few hundred people could jump on Bridge Day, and they all had to be expert _B_uilding, _A_ntenna, _S_pan, and _E_arth jumpers. Not novices, not moderately skilled - experts. Josh was an expert. So was Kat. No shock _there_, with her "anything you can do, I can do better" approach to life.  
  
"This isn't about _you,_ McGrath," she pointed out without missing a stroke. "This is about N-Tek. _Jefferson_ would jump if it got the company some press."  
  
The thought of his father participating in such a high-profile event made him grin. Jefferson Smith never went near a camera if he could help it, let alone the world's largest extreme-sports event. Still, Kat had a point. "I know."  
  
They ran the first set of rapids with no trouble whatsoever - a two-second slide over smooth rocks and foam. The river settled down immediately afterward. Lift, dip, stroke.  
  
After about thirty seconds of more calm water, Kat said, "Okay, so... I'm bored."  
  
"Yeah, me too." Which was a bummer. really. They had all day, plus most of the next day, before the bridge fun started. And they couldn't _do_ anything. Well, they _could,_ but he didn't want to. He wasn't willing to miss the once-a-year event because he'd gotten hurt on the rapids.  
  
Apparently thinking the same thing, Kat asked, "Why couldn't we do this _after_ Bridge Day?"  
  
Josh shrugged. "Because Dad wants us back in Del Oro."  
  
Secretly, he suspected that his father wanted them back right away just so they couldn't go whitewater rafting. Even though Gauley Season had come and gone - and he itched to come back and run that at some point - the New River's lower stretch was more than decent. There was also a skateboarding competition in Oak Hill the day after which he'd wanted to check out, and he sort of wanted to cruise by Snowshoe and look at the skiing possibilities on this worn-down side of the Mississipi.  
  
"Hey, Trip, check it _out!_ It's our old friends!" someone called behind them, voice loud and sneering, and Josh abruptly stopped paddling.  
  
The first thing that sprang to mind was, "Oh, God, no." But what he said was, "Kat. Please tell me that isn't who I think it is." He didn't want to look.  
  
She twisted around and said, "If you're afraid it's Ethan Raptor, then I can't help you."  
  
Josh pounded the side of the kayak with one fist. "Why, why, _why?_"  
  
"Because.... the universe hates you?" Kat suggested, much too happily, and he glared at her.  
  
The first time he'd had a prolonged encounter with Team Raptor's star athlete, it had nearly killed him. Further (and mercifully more brief) encounters at various competitions had done nothing to improve Josh's opinion of Ethan. The guy was loud, arrogant, and convinced of his immortality, all of which combined meant he was famous for taking incredibly stupid risks. Not even being buried in an avalanche and, shortly thereafter, nearly falling off a cliff had changed Ethan's attitude.  
  
Josh could not _stand_ him. He had a higher tolerance for _Psycho_.  
  
"Paddle faster and don't look back," he told Kat. If they could outrun Ethan, they wouldn't have to put up with him...  
  
But she gave him a disgusted look, said, "That's too rude even for me. Besides, he's got Trip with him," and Josh knew all hope for escape was lost.  
  
Trip Thompson fell neatly into the category of "dumb jock". He was loyal to Ethan, but generally as friendly as Ethan was hostile - if only because he lacked the brains to be neither disloyal nor mean. Despite his overall density, Trip had more common sense than his teammate. Way back when, some time after Max and Ethan had been plucked from the cliff, Berto had made a few desultory remarks about how well Trip and Kat had worked together.  
  
Now Josh eyed her suspiciously. Being rude was not something Kat ordinarily avoided. "Don't tell me you _like_ Trip."   
  
The corner of her mouth twitched. "Josh, he's a big dumb puppy. And puppies _look_ cute, but if you take them home, they eat your shoes."  
  
"Yo, McGrath, what's the _matter?_"  
  
"That _voice,_" Josh muttered, just loud enough for Kat to hear, and winced in only half-feigned agony. "It's like nails on a chalkboard..."  
  
She rolled her eyes, thoroughly unimpressed. "Stop whining."  
  
Josh sighed and, resigned to his fate, managed to twist around without dumping himself into the river. Ethan and Trip were both in individual kayaks, and closing the gap rapidly. He forced himself to answer Ethan's question. "Just trying to figure out how far to the next rapids."  
  
Ethan laughed - a short, scornful sound - and gestured at the water in front of them with the tip of his paddle. "_Rapids?_ These aren't _rapids_."  
  
"Of course not," Josh said, already grinding his teeth. "But we're jumping tomorrow."  
  
"Dude, so am I," Trip said, grinning broadly as they fell in alongside Josh and Kat. His expression sobered almost immediately. "But like, they totally burned Ethan."  
  
One of Kat's eyebrows hiked up. "Oh yeah?"  
  
"Yeah," Trip said, nodding in a vaguely mournful fashion. "They said he didn't have enough experience, you know, with BASE. Which is _way_ not true, but they're in charge, so that was it."  
  
Josh knew he'd liked the officials for a reason. If he _had_ to be around Ethan today, then at least he had the joy of knowing he wouldn't be jumping with the jerk later.   
  
His mood lifted slightly.  
  
"Man, shut up," Ethan told Trip, scowling. Trip didn't even blink.  
  
"Uh..." Josh cast a glance at the water ahead. "We'd better get going, I guess. There's a lot of river to cover before we reach take-out." The plan had been to take out at the end of the day and then hike along the river to a moderately challenging rock climb, which would keep them busy until about halfway through the day before the jumping. He wondered if he could modifiy the plan to get away from Team Raptor, or if Kat would think it was too rude.  
  
"Oh?" Ethan challenged. "Where's your take-out?"  
  
Evading the answer would be pointless, and just make them look bad, so Josh said, "Stone Cliff."  
  
"Hey, ours too," Trip said, delighted. Kat's analogy of a big dumb puppy was about right, Josh decided. "So, uh, can we hang with you guys?"  
  
Of course, that was too polite a request, so Ethan had to tack on a smug, "Yeah, we'll show you how the _experts_ do it."  
  
"Great," Josh said, with forced enthusiasm that was probably only visible to the larger part of the Western Hemisphere. "Let's go." 


	3. Public Relations

Notes: Once again, never been there. Any factual errors are therefore due to my utter lack of clairvoyance. Aside from the final third of Team Raptor, there's another minor character popping up in here just 'cause I like him, not because he adds anything to the plot. And hey, thanks, reviewers! What are the odds that four of us would be working on Max fics at the same time, huh?

* * *

Fayetteville was a small but bustling little town on the western side of the New River Gorge Bridge. It was collectively overjoyed to host Bridge Day every year, mostly due to the influx of over two hundred and fifty thousand spectators that came along with the four hundred-odd jumpers. Two hundred and fifty thousand people equaled a _lot_ of money. Berto had been told by the hotel manager that the good citizens wouldn't mind a second or third day of jumping festivities, but legal matters prohibited that. Apparently, closing off the bridge and the highways leading to it was technically illegal, and it was only the good humor of the government that kept the six-hour annual celebration happening.

The government had a solid reason to be so magnanimous: Bridge Day pulled in a lot of money for more than just Fayetteville, and it attracted news media to West Virginia as a whole. The day was a public relations gold mine; it was, after all, the world's single largest extreme-sports event, and a great chance for Team Steel (and N-Tek) to grab a bigger audience.

But first he had to get to the trade show before it opened.

He parked the van as close to the hotel as he could, then ran through the ritual of setting the security system - one bombing was enough, thank you - before grabbing a doughnut and some last-minute items. He had exactly five minutes to get inside, get the booth ready, and look professional. No sweat.

Then his cell phone rang, startling him into letting go of the doughnut, and he spent a few seconds inadvertantly juggling it before finally catching it again. The phone was still ringing. He spent another few seconds trying to get it out of his pocket without dropping anything else, which was harder than he thought it would be. What he needed was an extra hand.

Berto solved the problem by shoving the doughnut in his mouth, pulling out the phone, balancing it on his shoulder, and removing the doughnut with his now-freee hand. That was a doctorate's worth of creative thinking, there. "Hello?"

"Berto," Jefferson's voice said. "Good morning."

"Oh, uh, hi, Jefferson." He paused outside the hotel's 'employee only' entrance and checked his watch; it was just getting to be morning in Fayetteville, so it was barely dawn in Del Oro. Even the most dynamic of CEOs were still asleep in their beds; but then, Jefferson never left the office, and as someone who used to be a permanent office fixture himself, Berto could appreciate that.

"How's the trade show going?"

Berto used his foot to wedge the door open, nearly losing the phone in the process. "Just heading in, sir. We set up the booth last night, so we're ready to go."

'So please don't ask where Josh is,' he added silently. This was _not_ an authorized trip. Josh and Kat were supposed to be with him, at the trade show, selling N-Tek. That was why they'd set up the booth last night - because this morning would be wasted driving down to the rafting put-in at Hinton and back.

"Good, good." Jefferson - he couldn't bring himself to call the man "Jeff" - moved right along: "Where's Josh?"

Berto winced. He hated lying, which was probably a good thing, because he wasn't very skilled at it. Sure, he occasionally pulled one off, but on the whole, it was a loss. He didn't know how Josh had managed to lie to so many people for so long. Manuevering into the hotel proper, he tried, "Uh - he's busy, sir."

It was, of course, a paper-thin lie, delivered unconvincingly, and his boss saw through it immediately. In a harder tone, Jefferson repeated, "Where is he?"

Berto closed his eyes and told himself that only Josh could be blamed for this. "Whitewater rafting."

Jefferson was silent for a moment, then exhaled slowly. "And where's Kat?"

He sounded like he already knew the answer, so Berto said, "Doing the exact same thing."

"Those two are going to cost me a fortune in antacids," Jefferson muttered. "Well, it's too short-notice to send anyone else out today. I'll see if we can spare someone from Marketing for tomorrow, but you'll be solo until then. Handle it however you have to - just as long as the booth stays open. Got it?"

"Not a problem." That lie sounded almost passable.

Jefferson bid him good luck and hung up. Berto sighed and set everything down behind N-Tek's booth in the hotel confrence room, which was slowly filling with people. The booth had several television monitors and computers, all of which were running different footage, and it took even him some time to get them all started up. Then he had to set out all of the freebie items - mostly keychains and stickers with the N-Tek logo, along with some pens in assorted aqua and green flavors - and arrange everything else. This show was all about hyping N-Tek's new low-speed parachute, which was specifically designed for BASE jumping events like Bridge Day, although it would almost certainly wind up starring in unauthorized jumps in state parks out West. They also had some rappelling gear and rock-climbing equipment; rappelling from the bridge was a secondary event of the festival, and almost as popular as the jumping.

They did not have anything for running whitewater.

By the time he'd gotten it all squared away, the doors had opened and the first wave of Bridge Day tourists had begun wandering in. N-Tek, with its excellent booth location and well-known brand name, was popular. Very popular. And after the first dozen disgruntled extreme sports fans gave him an earful about the lack of extreme athletes, Berto was ready to do something drastic. All he needed was one more person asking him-

"Where's Team Steel?"

He looked up sharply, a nasty comment - as nasty as he could make it on short notice - ready to go, and found it replaced by a startled, "What -?"

Standing on the other side of the counter, wearing a sympathetic grin, was Carlie Hoffman, manager of Team Raptor. She was also wearing the tourist uniform - t-shirt, jeans, jacket, baseball cap - and it took Berto a second to recognize her. "They ditched you, didn't they?" she asked.

He blinked and tried to discreetly look behind her for Ethan or Trip, neither of whom he felt up to dealing with at the moment. "Ah, yeah. What are you doing here?"

"Being ditched," she said, matter-of-fact. "My 'boys' are whitewater rafting down the New River."

The implications of that sank in fast. Berto suspected that Josh would, after all, rather deal with one of their villains - even Woody Barkowski - than Ethan Raptor. "So are Josh and Kat."

They exchanged a knowing glance, and then Carlie shrugged and said, "Well, it's a big river. The bodies probably won't surface for a while."

At that, he had to laugh. Carlie was the only thing that kept Team Raptor from being kicked out of every event they attended, even more so than Ethan's obvious level of talent; she was smart, capable, and always knew exactly what to say to make everyone get along again. "Probably not," he agreed.

She clapped her hands together. "So. Short of sitting around and watching bad movies on the hotel TV, I have absolutely nothing to do. Need some help?"

"Actually, yes," he said, moving some of the stacks of N-Tek paraphenalia so that she could have a place to sit. Tomorrow would be a different story, maybe, but today her offer was a godsend.

She looked about as grateful as he was relieved, and moved quickly to take the proffered seat on the other side of the booth. "Great!" she said, flashing him a brilliant smile.

He returned the smile, beginning to see some spark of joy in this long day, and then heard another voice he recognized: "Hey, Martinez. There's a noticible lack of athletes around here."

"Orrin," Carlie said before Berto could say anything. "Good morning! How are you?"

LiveSport had won the broadcasting rights to Bridge Day this year, having snatched them away from ESPN in retaliation for the latter network stealing the X Games. Berto was not surprised to see that they'd sent Orrin Carter, who usually covered Team Steel and Team Raptor both. He had probably come to West Virginia looking for a vacation from all the freaky things that happened on a circuit where one team secretly consisted of professional counterterrorist spies. Berto fervently wished that Orrin would have a peaceful, freak-free broadcast this time, if only because such a broadcast meant that _his_ life would be a little less frantic.

"Just fine," Orrin said, at once friendly and professional. "But Martinez - you still haven't explained where Team Steel has gotten to."

Berto grinned and started playing the PR game, despite the fact that Orrin was _sans_ cameraman. He was getting pretty good at it, and on some days he thought he might even like it. "Don't tell anyone, but Team Steel is enjoying the local whitewater. An opportunity like this was too much to pass up."

Orrin nodded, amused. "And what about you, Ms. Hoffman? Fraternizing with the enemy?"

Carlie adjusted her glasses and looked aloof - for a moment. Then she broke into a grin as well. "Nope - demonstrating manager solidarity. Team Raptor is also enjoying the gorgeous river system."

Orrin's eyebrows rose sharply, no doubt as he came to the same conclusion that everybody else had, but all he did was turn to Berto and ask, "They _are_ going to be back here for the big day, right? I can't do a live broadcast without the circuit's most prominent rising stars."

With an assurance he didn't entirely feel, Berto said, "Of course they are."


	4. Deja Vu All Over Again

Note: WV being a state built largely by coal mining, there are a lot of mines, functional and not. Most old mines are sealed in one way or another, but the danger is still very real if you find an open one and you're stupid enough to go inside. But if you simply _must_ see what a coal mine's guts looks like, there's always the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine, in - surprise! - Beckley. Which I have never been to.

* * *

"I'm gonna die, and it's gonna be your fault!" Kat yelled over the noise of the whitewater. The noise was somewhat louder than usual, since she was clinging to a rock in the middle of one of the more vicious Class III rapids.

"Just hold your horses, Ryan!" Josh yelled back at her. She made rescuing so _difficult_. Like it was _his_ fault that Ethan had slammed into her kayak and sent it crashing into an outcropping of rocks. _Or_ that it was his fault that the fiberglass hull had spilt wide open upon impact - in defiance of its rigorously safety-tested design - and promptly been swamped, thus dumping her into the water. _Or_ that it had taken him nearly five minutes to manuever out into the rapids - he couldn't change nature, no matter how many nanomachines he had swarming in his blood. "_This_ is why we wear life jackets."

"No DUH!" she shouted. Her hands slipped a fraction on the wet, algae-covered rock, and Josh let out more line in a hurry. His grappling gun had many uses, one of them being emergency rescues - which was fortunate, because this was definitely an emergency _and_ a rescue. It was also fortunate that the bank was close enough for him to anchor the business end of the line into solid, dry bedrock. He would've preferred, of course, not having to actually get _in_ the river, but sometimes you just had to swim. His own kayak, still intact, was with Trip.

Wherever Trip was. After Kat had gone under, Josh's attention had narrowed to the scope of her rescue and consequently he had been ignoring the other two athletes, although he was thinking of a few choice words for Ethan.

"You owe me big," he said to her, letting the current swing him closer to Kat's position. "This water is _freezing!_"

"Don't make me repeat myself," she snapped. Her fingers slipped another few centimeters, enough for the water to win the tug-of-war and pry her from the rock altogether. But Josh was within grabbing distance now, and caught her wrist just as she was about to be swept away. He pulled her in closer, supporting her until she recovered enough equilibrium to keep herself abovewater, then shifted his grip on the grappling gun so she could take hold of it too. A flip of a switch and the line began reeling itself - and them - in.

"DUDE!" Trip called from the bank, and Josh looked over his shoulder to see him standing high and dry, with the three remaining kayaks beached close at hand and Ethan nowhere in sight. Trip was clearly impressed. "That totally ROCKED!"

"It took you long enough," Kat told Josh. Even with her wetsuit, she was starting to shiver. For that matter, so was he, and he began swimming to speed the return journey. Shivering, just like everything else these days, burned T-juice. Stupid nanoprobes.

He waited to respond to Kat's jibe until they'd reached the river's edge, some distance away from Trip and the kayaks. Releasing the grapple's end from its anchor and reeling in the remaining line, he asked, "And you survived for _how_ long as a solo agent?"

She pushed him away with a heartfelt, "Bite me, McGrath."

"But I don't know where you've been," he said, feigning innocence and doing a poor job of it.

Kat gave him a death glare and started unstrapping her helmet. "Oh, you are just _asking_ for it."

Josh's humor evaporated, and he shoved the grapple into his backpack with a violence that neither the grapple nor the backpack had earned. "Hey, _I'm_ supposed to be the one with the attitude problem right now."

"Yeah, well, you know, sometimes I get sick of being rescued," she said, voice flatter than normal. Either she didn't care, or she was full-on angry. The latter was more likely, and had he been in a better mood, he would've cared more. "Damsel in distress I am _not_."

Trip, jogging over, stopped the conversation with a soliticious if ungrammatical, "Kat, are you like, okay?"

She got the helmet off and immediately rubbed one ear. "I'm freezing and my ear feels like a balloon. It's not swelling, is it?

Trip leaned in, squinting. "No, but it's seriously red."

Josh glanced at her, decided that red was the wrong shade (it was more like purple), and then refocused on something slightly higher on his priority list. "Where's Ethan?"

The other athlete was nowhere to be seen - hadn't been seen by Josh for some time, not since knocking Kat off-course. Given that they were standing on a deserted riverbank with nothing but a forested mountainside behind them and whitewater rapids in front of them, the opportunities for vanishing were limited at best. All of the kayaks were beached, which narrowed possibilities further. Still, it was _Ethan_.

"Who cares? Where's the nearest phone? Mine's trashed." She dropped the mangled, soaking remains of her cell phone on the ground for emphasis.

"Mine too," Josh said, lying. He wasn't carrying one; why should he? He had a biolink, and Kat carried everything. Besides, not having a cell phone left room in his backpack for a candy bar. "Trip, did you see where Ethan went?"

At the moment, all Trip could see was Kat. Josh made a valiant effort to keep the scowl off of his face; Trip had no business ogling _his_ teammate. Not that Josh had any claim on her beyond that, but it was like Pete or someone telling him his sister was hot. If he'd had a sister.

Massively distracted, Trip somehow managed to get out a fairly coherent sentence: "Uh, yeah, up the hill. Mountain. Whatever."

Josh turned his back on Trip and Kat and scanned the mountain. A flash of raptor red moving upwards through the unmoving orange-yellow trees proved that Trip was telling the truth. "Why?"

Trip managed to stop looking at Kat long enough to frown in puzzlement and scratch his head. "I dunno. Oh, right. He got bored waiting and wanted to see if there were any caves or something."

Josh stared up in horror. There was no snow on the mountains - no avalanches here - but there were rockslides, and mudslides, and abandoned coal mines all over this stupid state, and Ethan, never big on safety or even common sense, was probably signing his own death warrant. _If_ Team Steel didn't ride to his rescue once again. "I don't _believe_ this..."

Kat slung her backpack on again and sighed. "Well, I know where _we're_ going. Trip, could you see if you guys have a first-aid kit while we go find Ethan?"

"Sure," he said, an instantly obedient puppy, and ran towards the kayaks. Josh was already heading up the mountainside. A thin dirt track, badly overgrown but still sporting some gravel in the deep center ruts, led upwards in a mostly straight fashion. He started jogging a little, to make up for lost time; given the rescue and the conversation with Trip, Ethan had, at the most, ten minutes on them.

Kat caught up quickly, but the track petered out soon after.

"Now where?" Josh asked.

She surveyed the area for a moment, hands on hips, then pointed. "Right there. See the breakage? And there's a trail, probably made by deer or whatever lives on these mountains."

Josh blinked. The random tangle of trees and undergrowth suddenly resolved itself into a blatant trail. He shook his head and went down it. "I knew I should've taken that second round of N-Tek survival training."

Kat followed. "No wonder you always get your head handed to you in the Amazon."

"I do not!"

"Uh-huh."

The going was a lot tougher on this trail, but Ethan had definitely taken it - running, it looked like, now that Josh was alert to the signs. The track wound and twisted back on itself with a logic visible only to animals. Five minutes later and with no appreciable progress, or any sighting of Ethan, Josh's already frayed temper was nearing its end.

"_Biocon_ is easier to find! Where _is_ he?"

"Up a tree and laughing at us, I bet." Kat was still rubbing her ear. "Ugh. This is _definitely_ swelling. Now I'll have to take my earrings out."

Taking the earrings out, he knew from prior observation, was a long and labor-intensive process under the best of circumstances, because Kat was uncharacteristically fussy about the care and maintenance of her jewelry. He kept trudging along. "It's your fault for having so many holes in your head."

"They're _piercings,_ thank you, and they're cool."

"At least you don't have _piercings_ anywhere else." As soon as he'd said it, though, he wondered. "You don't, do you?"

She snorted. "No. But I do have a tattoo."

That actually stopped him in his tracks, and he whipped his head around to stare at her incredulously. "A _what?_"

"That looks like a mine entrance up there," she said, ignoring the question and pushing right past him.

He opened his mouth to continue this particular line of conversation, then decided to hold it back for later heckling opportunities. Instead, he followed her to the alleged mine entrance.

She was right. The path leveled out and broadened into a grass-choked terrace. More gravel, mixed liberally with blackened dirt, crunched underfoot. The terrace curled around and ended at a blank hole in the mountain. It was slightly higher than Josh's head, and big enough for at least five people to walk into simultaneously.

And it was wide open. Not a barrier in sight. A cool breeze - colder than the October air they were standing in - whistled out of the mine entrance, carrying with it the scent of time and decay. There was something else, too, a tang of something Josh couldn't identify.

He scratched his head, frowning. "I thought the government or somebody sealed all of these off."

She crouched and examined the rocky soil in front of the gaping hole. "I guess they missed this one. Something's just been through here, and it wasn't a bear."

"There aren't any bears in West Virginia," he said, scoffing at the very idea. Then he remembered one of Berto's scare-tactic lectures. "Uh, no grizzly bears, I mean."

She stood up, wiping her hands off on the neoprene covering her legs. "Nice recovery."

He made a face; she made one back in retaliation. Then he turned back to the mine and to the never-ending task of saving Ethan from himself.

Inside, it was pitch black. There was the pale yellow-white beam of a flashlight sweeping around not too far inside, splashing off of gray-black rocks and alarmingly old-looking wooden supports. Everything he could see was coated with a sheen of oily water.

Josh stepped just inside the mine opening, feeling the cold and damp even with the clammy wetsuit on, and called out, "Ethan?"

"Right here, man." The flashlight was deceptive; the words came from much farther into the mine, and they echoed around. "You should _see_ this!"

"Ethan, these mines aren't safe," Josh said. "Get out before you get hurt!"

"Dude, relax. Nothing's gonna happen." Ethan came closer, shining the flashlight directly into Josh's eyes. "Stop being such a chicken."

Josh put up a hand to shield his face, more annoyed than blinded. Even out of Max mode the nanoprobes compensated for a good deal. "Being safe and using common sense isn't being chicken, you moron."

It was a lesson drilled into him by two fathers - Jefferson more so than Jim, to be honest. Jeff was nothing if not dedicated to safety, both for his own son and everyone else's children. Josh had never participated in any kind of sport without the appropriate safety gear, took pains to make sure he didn't get too crazy as Max, and it violated all of his deepest beliefs to see someone acting recklessly.

He was starting to get the feeling that Ethan knew it and was deliberately provoking him. He wouldn't put it past him.

Ethan made a highly unattractive clucking noise and smacked one of the support beams. "Oh no, watch out! The sky is falling!"

"That is seriously not smart," Kat said, but was pretty much drowned out by Josh demanding, "Knock it off, Raptor!"

"Get real," Ethan said, the words spiked with mocking laughter. "I could do this all day long and nothing would happen."

To prove his point, he hit the support beam again, and harder this time. A handful of tiny pebbles fell from the ceiling, accompanied by a more generous shower of dust and dirt.

Josh lunged forward and grabbed Ethan by the arm, yanking him away from the beam. "Knock it OFF!"

Ethan shoved him back, indignant and moving quickly towards full-blown anger. Josh didn't care; a fight was preferable to a cave-in, and his main objective - getting Ethan away from the wall - had been achieved. But the damage had been done.

A low, groaning sound echoed through the mine, freezing everyone in their places. Josh had time to glance at the support beam, see the ancient, water-rotted wood splintering and grinding down on itself, look over his shoulder at Kat, and then above her head where deep fracture lines had appeared in the rock, racing towards the entrance in a dozen small showers of dirt and pebbles - or maybe the fractures had been there all along and no one had noticed, but there was nothing he could do about it now -

There was a sharp crack, the entire world seemed to shake, and then, somewhere in between him diving forward and Ethan falling backwards, the ceiling dropped with a thunderous boom. After that it was just pitch-black confusion, full of choking dust and the familiar but perpetually distressing worry that his teammate hadn't made it. The worst of the rockfall had been over her head, but she had nine eternal lives and quick reflexes besides. He hoped.

"Kat, status," he said, sitting up and fumbling for the flashlight in his backpack.

"Alive -" she coughed, somewhere to his left "- and kicking. Ethan?"

A burst of coughing that didn't come from either of them was answer enough. Josh stood up and flicked on the flashlight.

The dust was so thick that it looked opaque in the beam of light. It cleared after a moment, a little, and revealed a solid wall of rocks blocking their only way out.

"We're trapped," he said, wide-eyed in alarm and _deja vu_.

"Not if you-know-who shows up," Kat murmured, coming to stand beside him so Ethan wouldn't hear.

He considered it. Quickly. A thousand possible options and consequences. The rockfall was massive, but deceptively so. A brief scan with his nano-enhanced vision showed serious instability where the wall of rocks met the ceiling. But that was both blessing and curse. "Yeah..." he said, keeping his voice just as low, "I could punch through it and bring the rest of the mountain down on our heads. _And_ I don't have the regenerator."

"So there goes _that_ idea, in other words."

Behind them, coughing, Ethan said loudly, "Great, trapped in _another_ cave. This is _perfect_. Nice going, McGrath."

"ME? This is _your_ fault," Josh said, rounding on him with all the pent-up fury of the day. "It's ALWAYS your fault! You run off and do something completely insane and drag everybody else into trouble with you!"

"Hey, I didn't _ask_ you to follow me," Ethan countered, stabbing a finger in Josh's direction. "It's _your_ fault you're here, not mine. Okay? So take your jealousy and step off!"

Josh swung an arm through the remnants of the dust cloud, gesturing so broadly that even Ethan would have to understand the gravity of the situation. "We're buried inside a coal mine with no way to reach the outside world - and _no one knows where we are!_ This is how people _die,_ Ethan!"

"You know what? You can just kiss -"

But the rest of the sentence was lost, because there was a sudden dull thunking noise, and then Ethan's eyes rolled back and he crumpled forward. Josh caught him reflexively, then lowered him to the ground and looked at the place where he'd been standing in mild confusion.

"Blah, blah, blah," Kat said, tossing a fist-sized rock into the darkness behind her. "This'll be a lot more bearable with him unconscious, don't you think?"

Josh was delighted and aghast at the same time. "You hit him with a _rock?_"

"It was the only blunt object I had." She faced him with her hands on her hips. "So are we gonna look for a way out or what?"

"There's not much point," he said, which earned him a very incredulous stare indeed. "Look," he went on, sighing, "there's air circulating in here. Fresh air. I can feel a draft and all the dust is clearing out pretty fast. We're not going to suffocate. And Berto'll come looking for us sooner or later. We just need to sit tight and not do anything stupid."

_"Staying put and waiting for rescue, as opposed to wandering off and dying"_ had, in fact, been covered in Survival Training 101 - and 102 - so Josh didn't expect much more argument from his fractious partner. And for once, he didn't get any.

"Oh, boy. Waiting. Always my strong point." She unslung her backpack and dropped it to the ground some distance away from the rockfall, then followed it a moment later. "I'll just sit here and contemplate my navel, thank you."

Minus the sarcasm, Josh felt that was a fairly good idea. He made sure Ethan wasn't having any trouble breathing, then sat down himself, leaning up against the rough, damp mine wall next to Kat. He flicked off the flashlight a moment later, conserving it, and they were plunged into dusty darkness. The only light came from the digital readout on his "watch," which currently said it was 11:02 AM EST, and the faint green glow barely illuminated his wrist.

He could see into infrared (well, Max could, and Josh could too if he squinted right) but chose instead to close his eyes. A blank feed from the biolink would alarm Berto just as much as one showing the IR profile of a mine... and it would conserve transphasic energy to boot.

The silence was vast and enfolding, broken only by their breathing, the faint irregular drip of water, and the occasional muted sounds of whatever else was in the mine with them. He hoped it wasn't anything larger than a raccoon. Of course, his imagination and experience quickly supplied him with a dozen scarier scenarios.

And then there was the little detail of having a mountain hanging over their heads.

To stop himself from freaking out, he said, "I can't believe you hit him on the head with a rock."

Ethan breathed, snoring a little. He was definitely out cold.

Kat made an indelicate noise that sounded a good deal like the snoring. "Oh, like you're complaining."

He checked again. 11:03.

"Bro," he said under his breath, "get here fast."


	5. Lunching With The Enemy

Note: The restaurant is real - or it was, at least. I think they went out of business. Anyway, it was located on the road to Hawk's Nest State Park, near Anstead, not in Fayetteville. (And if you're going to Hawk's Nest, you must, must, _must_ pay a visit to The Mystery Hole, easily _the_ greatest tourist trap ever created. I _have_ been there, and it is always a blast, but I could not for the life of me work it into this fic.) The furniture is based on that of a bar one of my dad's WV friends used to own, except the chairs there were actually tree stumps. Classy.

And our final one-shot character debuts in this chapter; unlike Team Raptor, he's a good ol' Season One bad guy.

* * *

Berto had long since lost track of time. As the day wore on, the trade show filled up, with more and more people arriving every second - and they all seemed to beat an immediate path to N-Tek's proverbial door. Somewhere in between keeping track of all the merchandise orders, the occasional employment application (mostly from boasting jocks looking to join Team Steel), the endless demonstrations, the more formal conversations with prospective large-scale buyers, keeping the boasting jocks from rioting due to Josh and Kat's absence, and playing nice to the roaming media hounds, the exact hour just seemed to slip away from him.

So when Carlie stood up and said, "Where should we go to eat?" he could only blink at her and repeat, blankly, "Eat?"

"Yeah, eat." One of her eyebrows quirked up in amusement. "You know, that little meal called 'lunch'?"

He checked his watch and found that it was, indeed, late in the afternoon. But he could've sworn that he'd had a meal in there somewhere... "Lunch?"

She crossed her arms over her chest; both eyebrows were up now. "It's almost three o'clock, Berto."

"Wow." He shook his head. Jefferson's orders or not, it was time for him to get away from the trade show. Usually he didn't forget things like meals unless he was in the middle of a project. "Okay, I really need to get out of here. And I'll buy, wherever we go."

Carlie laughed and they started shutting down the booth, securing everything that might be tempted to walk away while they were gone. "An offer you might regret. There's a restaurant down the street that serves authentic West Virginian cuisine, and it is _fabulous_."

Berto, an international citizen if ever there was one, hadn't known there was such a thing, or that it was fabulous. What he'd seen of the eating in West Virginia seemed like standard flavorless Anglo food, with the requisite fast-food joints and terrible imitations of foreign meals on the side. Not that he'd refrained from eating. "What's that?"

"About six thousand calories per bite." She gave him a sunny smile. "Thus explaining the locals."

It was said so cheerfully, with so little hint of malice, that it took him a minute to realize she was being a bit too honest. To be honest himself, he'd noticed that a lot of the natives _were_ rather on the large side - a far cry from the slim, trim Californians he was used to seeing. West Virginia was, in fact, the most obese state in the nation, something that alarmed him as a (sort of) medical doctor but that didn't seem to overly bother anyone else. Certainly it didn't interfere with their penchant for hosting crazy jumping-off-a-bridge festivals.

Putting aside caloric value for the moment, they made their way out of the hotel and down the street, winding in and out of the crowds. The entire town was buzzing with excitement, it seemed, and the sidewalks were full of people sightseeing and windowshopping in the strong afternoon sun. The weather forecast had been right - it was topping out at around seventy degrees, and a cool breeze blew down the street, ruffling hair and t-shirts.

Berto was surprised when Carlie grabbed his arm, but she just said, "I don't want to get separated." Still, it was a little - _different,_ walking down a busy street arm-in-arm with a girl. Add to that the fact that he was about to buy her lunch, and it was frighteningly like a date.

The restaurant loomed up ahead, tucked in between two larger buildings - an intentionally rustic affair of wood planks in a pioneer-style building. A faux-hand-lettered sign proclaimed, in big black letters, that it was "The Ain't U Et Yet Cafe." A group of people, all beefy local men, were climbing the fake porch's steps, looking equally rustic.

"Authentic," he said, his own eyebrows raising this time.

"It's a tourist trap, but who cares? I ate here last night with Trip and Ethan. You should see the menu," she said, tugging on his arm. "_Everything_ comes with gravy."

He opened his mouth to make some protest about his usual eating habits and how this mountaineer food drowned in disgusting slime was definitely not on the list, but then one of the men going into the restaurant caught his attention. For a moment Berto stared, startled and not believing the evidence of his own eyes. The _ladron_ was in jail - Berto had sent him there personally. So how -?

It couldn't be. It really couldn't be. But it was.

"Hello? Berto?" Carlie snapped her fingers in front of his face, sounding genuinely concerned. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," he said, distracted. He'd been right; there _were_ villains afoot in West Virginia. _A_ villain, at least. The bad guy wasn't on the New River with Josh and Kat, though. Instead, contrary to all expectations, he was right in the middle of Fayetteville, wrecking Berto's lunch plans.

"What are you looking at?" She followed his line of sight, standing on her toes to do so. "Who's that?"

"A fellow spear carrier," Berto said, making sure Lance Breamer had entered the building before he started moving again. Carlie's arm disentangled from his, but he caught her hand instead, pulling her through the crowd on a fast track to the restaurant. "I'll explain. Come on."

She followed without protest until they'd climbed the porch steps and Berto came to a screeching halt, trying in vain to peer through the fake-dirty, tiny panes of glass posing as windows.

"Who's that guy?" she asked, mercifully keeping her voice down.

"Lance Breamer," he answered in the same low tone. Abruptly, with the kind of belated instinct that had doomed him to a career of _watching_ spies, he realized that they were too conspicuous in their current location and tugged Carlie off the porch again.

The buildings on either side of the restaurant were set some distance apart. There was enough space in between for two elongated driveways - wrapping around the restaurant - that led back to a parking lot common to all three buildings. Berto headed down one of these driveways; headed up, actually, as Fayetteville, like most of the state, was built on the side of a mountain.

"Okay, Lance Breamer," Carlie said as she was summarily dragged along with him. She sounded impatient and curious all at once - more curious than anything else. "So do you owe him money or what?"

Berto owed him, but not money. He shook his head, pausing at the corner of the restaurant, where he could see the street and the parking lot both. What he wanted was a window with a good clear view of the interior, but there didn't seem to be many of those; like the front, the few windows were decoratively grimy. "He's a genius, but he's also crazy."

Carlie's already high level of curiosity climbed visibly higher; she looked at the restaurant, then back at Berto. "Wild. A mad scientist?"

"A mad engineer," Berto corrected. "He built a flying fortress, but it got turned into scrap metal after he was arrested." Uncertain as to how much he should tell, he added, "I, uh, had the 'lucky' opportunity to meet him and his plane in person."

"How so?"

He hesitated, even more uncertain about how much to tell, and settled on, "He took me hostage."

"Well, at least he had good taste." She dropped onto one of the concrete bumpers framing the parking lot spaces, frowning. "If he was arrested, what's he doing here?"

"I don't know," Berto said, trying to stay on task even as he wondered about the "good taste" remark. "But it can't be anything legal. He _should_ be in jail. The government locked him up in Leavenworth and threw away the key."

Carlie straightened, an idea blossoming across her face beneath the baseball cap. "Oh! I bet he escaped and he's on the run. Like those nutso abortion-clinic bombers and militia guys. They all hide out in West Virginia, right?"

Berto certainly was willing to credit Lance with enough intelligence and chutzpah to mastermind, execute, and succeed in an escape from a federal penitentiary. He gave the windows one last look, then gave up and just kicked at the scrubby, brown grass that was pushing through the crumbling edge of the asphalt parking lot. "Sure."

"We should call the police," Carlie said after a few moments.

"No," he said immediately. If anything, the first distress call would go to Max - or rather, Josh - but Berto wasn't sure where his teammates were, and whether or not it would even be necessary to yank them off of their river trip. It might - _might_ - be possible to talk the former self-crowned "King of the Sky" into some kind of peaceful surrender.

And the force of Earth's gravity _might_ stop being nine-point-eight meters per second squared. All it would take was one cosmic realignment.

"Lance is dangerous," Berto told her, ignoring the fact that he was embarking down a road of thought and action that was not quite logical nor safe. "He could have all kinds of weapons. I can't - The cops here just aren't prepared for him."

She stood up, brushing off her hands, obviously going into a managerial mode that had been practiced many, many times on her fractious star athlete. "And the alternative is?"

He took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses before saying, "I'll go in myself and find out what he's doing."

There was silence for a long moment, broken only by the sounds drifting back from the street, and then she said, "That's the most idiotic thing I've ever heard, and considering the people _I_ work with, buster, you can bet that's saying something."

"Carlie -"

"If he's so _dangerous,_ then why do you think you can handle him alone?" she exclaimed, cutting him off. Behind her own glasses, her eyes were flashing anger.

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Why indeed? He usually had Max and Kat at his back - out in front, to be more accurate. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd personally taken charge of an action situation, and he hadn't really enjoyed any of them. Field work, for him, went better as a spectator sport. "Because... I don't know. Look, I'm not going to the police, no matter what."

"Do you have to go right up to his face and confront him?" she challenged. "Can't we just... follow him around for a while?"

"We?"

"Yes," she said firmly, despite the fact that she looked pale and scared at the idea. "You and I. Call it extreme manager solidarity, but I'm not letting you do this alone."

He weighed the options. He really didn't want to go after Lance alone. But Carlie didn't have _any_ experience with this kind of stuff, and he didn't want to jeopardize her safety. Still... how safe would she be if he left her alone? How safe would anyone in Fayetteville be if he didn't get this tied up as quickly as possible? Lance was a terrorist, had been known to use destructive force, and in two days, there were going to be over two hundred thousand potential victims lined up on a bridge like sitting ducks.

"_We_ can go in and confront him. No," Berto said, forestalling the objection he knew was coming. The objection _he_ would've made if Josh or Kat had proposed this idea. "It's more dangerous to sneak around behind his back. Trust me."

Of course, he had no idea what they were going to do _after_ confronting Lance. It wasn't like Berto could wrestle the guy to the ground, or perform a daring sneak attack. He was hoping for a bolt of inspiration on that front.

Maybe habitually skipping Mass for the last few years had been a bad move.

She hesitated for a long few seconds, then finally nodded, looking troubled. "Okay. But I still don't like this."

"Would it make you feel better if I told you I'd done crazier things?"

It was a sorry excuse for a joke, and it fell rather flat because he was too unsure of his own reassurance, but she gave him a faint grin. "Yeah, actually. Let's go."

They made their way to the front of the restaurant again, attracting some looks from passers-by but not getting any real attention. The crowds were clearly at their peak and only getting worse as tourists scrambled to get their shopping done before heading home for the afternoon. Not a good time to be chasing fugitives. Carlie took his hand, and this time, he was more focused on the fact that her palm was clammy and her pulse was fast than the fact that she was touching him.

She gave him a slightly apologetic look. "I don't know whether to be scared or excited."

He suddenly remembered that there was a mandatory orientation meeting at 8:30 PM for all jumpers, which meant he had something like five hours to wrap this up and get there on behalf of Team Steel or risk the wrath of the officials. As if he needed more pressure...

Berto mustered up something approaching a grin, trying to pretend this was bothering him less than it was. "Me neither. Here goes nothing."

As they entered the restaurant, the people Lance had gone in with were exiting. Berto let go of Carlie's hand and brushed past them as they went through the swinging double doors, holding his breath and hoping that Lance was not two seconds away from bumping into him.

But Lance was nowhere to be seen.

The restaurant was dimly lit by dusty lanterns hanging from equally dusty roof beams. Fake-hillbilly artifacts lined the rough plank walls, obviously going for the Appalachian version of Planet Hollywood. Rustic-looking tables - really, nothing more than the large wooden spools that telephone lines were stored on - and rickety wooden chairs filled every available foot of floor space; they were in turn filled with people and food, and the restaurant was filled with the bustling noise of a lunchtime crowd.

None of those people, however, were Lance, no matter how many times he looked.

Berto's fear changed to something new: that Lance had spotted them and had gotten away during the time that he and Carlie were talking. He hesitated in the middle of the restaurant, Carlie beside him, trying to figure out what to do next. But for once in his life, he had no idea what that might be.


	6. A Light At The End

Note: The light in the mine is based on a story related in the book _The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales_ by Ruth Ann Musick, which is outdated but still cool. It kinda doesn't fit with the rest of the story, or the tone of the show overall, but I couldn't resist adding it, given that WV is a rather ghost-ridden state, folklore-wise - and it nicely filled in a minor plot hole.

The tattoo joke comes courtesy of _JAG,_ where it's sometimes mentioned that Mac has a tattoo, although she refuses to say where it is or what it looks like.

* * *

The mine was still pitch-black, although Josh's eyes had adjusted enough to make out some lighter shapes amidst all the ink, such as Ethan's unconscious body at his feet. In the light of his watch lay the remains of his and Kat's lunch: wrappers from two energy bars - one apiece - and half a bottle of water. They had more food, of course, but they weren't wasting it yet. N-Tek ran its agents through survival training. Right now their best chance lay in waiting for a rescue.

Or so Josh kept telling himself. But Berto hadn't contacted them yet, and it was causing him no end of worry. That wasn't like their manager or their friend, to not try to find out what was going on. Josh had come to the conclusion that Berto was either insanely busy, had been badly injured, or couldn't get a signal through the mountain rock. The first conclusion was the most likely, but the last was the one that worried him the most.

He and Kat had made a brief survey of their surroundings, which had netted the discovery of a plunging mine shaft that neither flashlight nor Max's IR could fully penetrate, and also a narrow, claustrophobic passageway that only led farther away from their chance at rescue. A few hours into the ordeal Josh's enhanced hearing had picked up a noise on the other side of the collapsed rocks, but since nothing had come of it, he'd finally given it up as wishful thinking. He had wishful thinking to spare.

His watch said it was 3:18 PM. It was the longest day of his life, and it wasn't over yet.

Ethan was still out cold. Josh would've worried, except Ethan's breathing was steady. He'd taken the other athlete's pulse a few times and found it to be normal. That didn't preclude a coma, but he trusted Kat to know how to lay someone out without causing permanent damage.

"I hate this," Kat said, making conversation because they were both bored to the point of tears. They'd done the stupid questions routine (what's the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? what's your favorite color at one hundred and fifty meters underwater?), argued about what skateboarding on the moon would be like (on the off chance they might actually get to do that someday), had even played the lamest game of "I Spy" ever ("I spy something... black.") and now they were back to plain old complaining. "Being stuck here. _Everything_ is covered with water."

"It's a good thing we have on wetsuits, then." Josh shifted, slouching more. She was right, though; sitting for several hours in slimy mine water was disgusting, and uncomfortable in the life jacket and helmet he still didn't feel comfortable in removing. "You've never been in a cave before, have you?"

"I have, but I was on a speed plan at the time." There were scritching noises. If he squinted, he could see her pushing off from the damp wall and walking aimlessly around the mine tunnel - not going _too_ far, he hoped. "In Afghanistan, a few weeks before our little introductory mission in the Amazon. Some convoy had been hijacked, and they thought that _maybe_ some nuclear material had been stolen and hidden in one of those stupid caves, and they asked N-Tek if they could _maybe_ send someone in to find out, and lucky me, I was in the region. So off I went."

He vaguely remembered hearing about that. Juggling college and espionage and two social lives had kept him pretty busy in those days - not a lot of time to hang out by the water cooler and collect gossip. And Kat hadn't been on his list of people to keep tabs on, mostly because they'd never met. Back then she had been a vague collection of horror stories. "What happened?"

"Well, it ended with some big explosions. No nukes, though."

"That's always a plus." The conversation lapsed into silence once again. After a minute or so of her continued wanderings and his continued stationary boredom, he said, "So."

"So?"

"You have a tattoo."

Even without seeing, he knew she was rolling her eyes. "I was in a _gang,_ Josh. They kind of encourage it."

Her misspent youth was always a touchy subject, but she sounded like she was in a fairly good mood about it today, surprisingly, and that, combined with his intense desire to bug her, prompted him to continue. "What's it look like?"

"None of your business."

"Okay..." He evaluated his chances and switched to a new tack. "_Where_ is it?"

"Here."

There was movement, but she was too far away to be truly illuminated by the watch, and by the time he switched over to infrared, he knew he'dve missed it. So he didn't try. Instead, he told her, "I can't see that."

A snicker was the only response.

He shook his head in resignation but half-grinned despite himself. There were moments when he still wished his dad had never assigned Kat as his partner, but there were more times when he was glad of it. It was always fun to have someone to match wits and skills with, even if she sometimes got the better of him. Sometimes he got the better of her. It all balanced out.

Any further conversation on the tattoo subject was forestalled by a low groan from Ethan's direction. Josh flicked on his flashlight and didn't bother to avoid shining it in the other athlete's face. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Raptor."

"My _head,_" came the pained response.

Josh coughed. "Yeah... uh... you got hit by a rock."

Ethan glanced from Josh to Kat with undisguised suspicion. "Which one of you was holding it?"

"Uh..." Josh started, wondering how he could get out of this one without telling the truth, because Kat was his partner and you just didn't rat on your partners. Especially when you were glad they'd done something. He glanced at Kat, who was leaning against the far wall again and not looking as though she intended to say anything either. "What makes you think one of us would hit you?"

"Because the last thing I remember is you yellin' at me for something I didn't do," Ethan said with open hostility, climbing to his feet. "That means it was _her,_ wasn't it?"

"What is _that?_" Kat said suddenly, coming to attention and staring down the mine with an intent expression.

"What's what?" Josh asked, at the same time Ethan muttered something about bad attempts at distraction.

She was frowning intently. "That light. What is it?"

Josh looked, didn't see anything, squinted and got into the infrared, didn't see anything, and switched back to say, "I don't see any light, Kat."

"It's _right there,_" she said, with an impatient gesture in the alleged light's direction. "No, wait, now it's moving."

"_Someone's_ been in the dark for too long," Ethan said, jerking his head in her direction, then added a muffled, "Ow."

"You're imagining things," Josh told her, although agreeing with Ethan rankled.

"I'm not imagining this. I'll prove it." And with that, she started walking briskly down the mine tunnel towards the clastrophobic passageway.

"Kat, don't wander off," he said, exasperated and more than a little concerned for her mental state. Being in the dark was driving _him_ a little crazy, and he privately considered himself to be more stable than she was. She gave no indication that she'd heard him; her boots left the far, watery edges of the flashlight's beam and he lost visual contact with her altogether. "Kat!"

Ethan rubbed the back of his head. "Maybe you should knock _her_ unconscious."

"Maybe I will." Josh glared in the direction Kat had gone, thinking dark thoughts about stubborn partners, and sighed. "Come on. We can't let her go off by herself."

He started walking and, after a moment, Ethan followed too, saying, "Yeah, you seem to have a real problem with that. Loser."

All of the anger and dislike that Josh had managed to submerge came right back up. Ethan was calling _him_ a loser? Without looking back, he said, "Remind me later to beat you up, okay? Right now I want to make sure we don't get even _more_ lost."

Ethan made an incredulous noise. "You can't take me."

Josh looked over his shoulder with wry amusement. "Trust me, I can."

Ethan shook his head and Josh turned back around - only to stop in surprise.

Kat was standing squarely in the flashlight's ray, hands on hips, one foot tapping, scowling against the light. "Hey, _boys._ I'll get out the measuring tape _after_ we're safe. Let's move it."

Josh and Ethan exchanged a gesture pointing out the obvious foolishness of women - they agreed on that, at least - and, lacking any real alternative, walked on.

And _kept_ walking for what felt like two seconds short of eternity, but what Josh's watch swore was less than thirty minutes. However long it was time-wise, the trip took them ever-deeper into the mountain's core. The mine tunnels had been constructed to follow the coal seam, not to be linear, and the path that they took courtesy of Kat's invisible light wound and twisted until Josh had no idea where they were in relation to where they'd started. That worried him.

At the same time, he wasn't sufficiently convinced that they should stop and turn back. Staying put would've been the best option, but now that they were mobile, the hope of a way out - however doubtful - was just tempting enough when weighed against the likelihood of getting desperately, as opposed to slightly, lost trying to find their way back to the entrance.

While he debated with himself, the minutes ticked by. It was finally simply easier to follow Kat, trust that she wasn't completely bonkers, and take comfort in the fact that he'd survived far worse situations. He wasn't going to die wandering lost in a mine in West Virginia with Ethan Raptor. No way. Not Max Steel.

"You could at least turn your flashlight on," Josh told her.

She called back, "I can see just fine."

He made a face that, in the darkness, no one would notice. She could see just fine because he still had his flashlight on and was shining it at her feet, but it was going to run out of juice soon. _Then_ they'd see who needed a flashlight.

"You can't see anything," Ethan said, daring her to correct him. "You don't even know where we're going. You're just crazy."

"I am _not_ crazy. And I'm telling you, I know where we're going," she insisted.

"Oh, SURE you do." Ethan's dogged scorn was justified, but annoying all the same. Having to keep tabs on the other athlete was wearing on Josh's nerves faster than worrying about finding his way back, or worrying about his teammate's sanity.

"You know," Josh said, "just once I want to go somewhere and have absolutely nothing happen."

"A normal vacation would be boring," Kat said, adding for Ethan's benefit, "Watch out - the ground slopes up here."

Josh had gone over his last few vacations in his mind as they'd been wandering through the mine, and he had to disagree with her. A normal vacation would be _perfect._ He hadn't had a single one since he'd become Max, which, come to think of it, had ruined his first college summer vacation. There'd been Spring Break in Baja with Laura - and pirates; a trip to Hawaii with Berto - and L'Etranger; an ocean cruise with other athletes - and Psycho; and now the most ill-fated mountain trip since the Donner Expedition.

Kat moved ahead while Ethan and Josh navigated the sudden incline. Ethan, grumbling to Josh, said, "Man, why don't we just _leave_ her?"

"Because she's my teammate." He barely stopped himself from saying "partner". Partner was a spy word. Or a relationship word. Neither would give Ethan the impression Josh wanted to give.

"She's gonna get us both killed," Ethan said anyway, apparently forgetting that she would get herself killed too.

"You're one to talk," Josh told him, glaring at him over his shoulder, and then, because Ethan _did_ have a point, took a few quick, long strides that brought him even with Kat. She was staring straight ahead, walking without looking down at the uneven floor of the mine.

"Kat," he said, finally grabbing her around the arm and forcing her to quit walking. "This has to stop."

She made a noise of annoyance and tried to yank her arm away, but Josh wasn't letting go anytime soon and the effort didn't net her much. For all her athleticism, he had a good four inches and nearly eighty pounds on her, and that was without the nanoprobes to back him up.

"It has to stop," he repeated.

"And what? What are we going to do? Follow the yellow brick road back to the entrance?" She shook his hand off defiantly and turned on her heel. "And if you touch me again, you're going down."

"Kat, I'm just saying-" he started, but cut himself off abruptly. "Nobody move!"

For a second, both of the other athletes froze. In that second, Josh heard clearly the sound he'd barely picked up: Trip's voice yelling for Ethan.

Ethan, oblivious to the fact that they were _this_ close to getting out, said disdainfully, "So now _you're_ doing it too. Freaks."

"Someone's down here," Josh said. "I heard them calling."

Without further ado, he pushed past Kat and ran down the tunnel, using his ears to figure out which branching corridor he should take. It was an old trick, following distant noise, and he had less trouble with it than he did with getting Kat to agree with him. She was following him - he could hear that too - and so was Ethan. It looked like they were all going to end this nightmare intact. Miracle of miracles.

The tunnel narrowed abruptly, then took a sharp left turn. Josh rounded the corner and barely avoided running straight into Trip.

The other athlete jumped back, surprised, and promptly broke into a relieved grin. "Whoa! Hey, Josh, whoa, am I glad to see you. For a sec I thought you were like a ghost or something. Where's Kat and Ethan?"

Josh turned around and shouted, "It's Trip!"

Kat and Ethan came into view a moment later. Both looked relieved, but not as relieved as Trip, who grabbed Ethan around the shoulders. "Ethan, man, thank goodness. Carlie was gonna kill me if I came back alone."

Ethan pulled back, waving his teammate away and reinforcing Josh's opinion of him as a grade-A jerk, with a muttered, entirely fake, "Yeah, good to see you too."

Kat moved on to more important matters. "Trip, how'd you get down here?"

Trip pointed over his shoulder. "There's a collapsed section back there. It's like a big hole, but you can climb down and back out. I found it by accident." He looked around and gave a half-laugh as they started down the tunnel. As promised, a collapsed section was not too far away, and sunlight filtered down over a slump of rocks and mud. Josh turned off his flashlight.

"I've been walking around down here for an hour or something," Trip added, "trying to find you guys. It's starting to creep me out."

Josh picked up that explanation and jumped on it. "Well, that explains it," he said to Kat. "You just saw the light from his flashlight."

Nevermind that it didn't explain why he, with his nanoprobe-enhanced senses, had seen nothing at all.

"The light I saw was blue," Kat said, crossing her arms over her chest. "Flashlights are yellow."

"_Ours_ are blue," Ethan cut in, scowling. "Turn it on and show them, Trip."

"Dude, I can't. I banged my flashlight against some rocks when I was climbing down. It's busted." Trip jiggled the flashlight emphatically. The light bulb, as advertised, failed to produce even a flicker.

Kat looked at each of them in turn, clearly unsettled despite her insistence that it hadn't been a flashlight in the first place. "So... what _did_ I see?"

Trip gazed blankly back. Ethan was glancing around like he expected a monster to drop in at any moment. Josh wasn't looking, but he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. "Maybe we should ask Berto to find out why this mine was abandoned."

She shook her head. "I'm kind of thinking, I don't want to know."

"I'm with you," Ethan said, pushing past all of them to the fallen rocks. He started scrambling up the incline with more speed than grace. "I'm getting out of here before something _else_ happens."

Trip shrugged and tried to give Kat a hand up onto the collapsed rocks, which she ignored in favor of hauling her own self up.

"It's a wasted effort," Josh told him in a low voice, in a tone that plainly said, _"Stay away from my sister."_ The only reaction he got was a resigned sigh. Then Trip climbed out with a few easy jumps, leaving Josh momentarily alone in the mine. Aboveground, Ethan and Kat were arguing about which was the fastest way to head down the mountain to where the kayaks were beached. Knowing Ethan, he and Trip would take off without looking back, leaving Team Steel to hike the three hours or so to the nearest phone, if Josh was remembering the maps right. The fun never stopped, it seemed.

Josh got a solid footing in the debris - as solid as muddy slate fragments could be, which wasn't very - and was just about to climb out himself when an ice-cold wind gusted down the mine tunnel with surprising force. Startled, he looked over his shoulder and caught the faintest flicker of blue light disappearing around a turn.

He wasn't sure, but he thought the light looked like a hand. A human hand. Waving good-bye.

Josh stared for a moment longer, then blinked and shook his head clear, saying, "I have got to get out of this mine," to no one in particular. Certainly not to a ghost hand.

And then he got the heck out of there.


	7. Glass Houses and Black Kettles

Note: Lance's greeting is borrowed from _The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.,_ where Pete would always say, "Hello, Brisco" in a drawn-out, flourishy kind of way. I loved that show. I think I actually cried when they canceled it. Network idiots.

* * *

"Hello, Berto," Lance's voice drawled out behind him, accent working overtime.

Berto froze for a second, then turned around. He grabbed for Carlie's hand again, more to keep her from doing anything ill-advised than for comfort - although it _was_ comforting. He was a terrible field agent; he had never managed to stop being nervous. Max and Kat jumped into crazy situations with glee, and he could get into it if he had to, but he was anticipating an ulcer any day now.

Especially when life handed him moments like this one.

"Surprised to see me, huh?" Lance said, before Berto could say anything. The outlaw was sitting casually at a table near the entrance,his back against the wall and his eyes on the entire dining area. "It's mutual. What the heck are you doing in Fayetteville?"

Lance had traded in the high-tech paramilitary uniform of their first meeting for a baseball hat, camouflage jacket, blue jeans, and hiking boots. A scruffy beard finished the ensemble. He looked exactly like half of the men in Fayetteville - completely average, and completely anonymous. If they lost him now, Berto feared, they'd lose him for good. He strengthened his resolve to finish this fast.

"Bridge Day," Berto said, because that was the truth and he felt that he should stick to it as much as possible. "What- what are _you_ doing here?"

"Visiting family," Lance said, and tilted his head in Carlie's direction. "I don't believe we've met, ma'am."

"Carlie Hoffman," she said. Berto glanced at her; her hand was no less chill than it had been, and her pulse no slower, but she sounded calm and composed and even slightly friendly, as though she thought Lance was just someone Berto knew.

Lance narrowed his eyes slightly. "Here for Bridge Day too, Ms. Hoffman?"

She nodded. "Carlie, please. Although LA is looking better by the minute."

"I know what you mean," Lance said, flashing a smile that was all teeth. He pushed a chair in Berto's direction. "Have a seat, little buddy. You too, Carlie."

Carlie found a chair of her own and took a seat, looking as though she wanted to bolt. Berto sat, but not without checking the entrance to see whether or not Lance's friends were doubling back. "Visiting family?" he prompted, sounding more skeptical than was probably wise.

Lance didn't look offended. He leaned back, hands toying with the utensils on the table. The dishes hadn't been cleared away yet, although the only thing left on most was a balled-up cloth napkin and a few smears of gravy. _Everything comes with gravy,_ Carlie had said. "It's the truth. Most of my kin hail from Texas, but I got a few cousins up here in the mountain state."

The way Lance was not-so-idly running a steak knife against the edge of a plate did nothing to make Berto feel better. "And they don't mind harboring a fugitive."

At that, Lance laughed. "Mind? They're moonshiners from way back - corn whisky, mostly. Heroes of the Prohibition. Freedom militia more recently. Ain't nothing wrong with breaking the law in this family."

"There's a shock," Berto muttered.

"Why, is that _sarcasm_ I detect, Martinez?" Lance stopped playing with the knife and instead held the gleaming metal blade up to the light, examining the edge. "Dangerous stuff. Almost as dangerous as a prison."

Berto decided to keep his mouth shut.

"I just got out," Lance said to Carlie, who quickly pasted a sympathetic expression on her face. It was false and Berto suspected Lance knew it. "Trumped-up charges from the government."

She clearly cast around for something to say and came up with, "That's - that's very sad."

"It was. Lotta violent people in prison," Lance said, drawing the words out slowly. "They throw you in with killers, you know. I never was a killer, no matter what else I did." He flicked the knife out suddenly, in a quick, discreet move of his whole body that brought the tip of the blade to Berto's ribs. "But lucky me - I'm a fast learner. Get up."

Berto flinched away, but realized he had nowhere to go without blowing Lance's cover and exposing a lot more people to potential death. Carlie had gone completely still, barely even breathing; he met her eyes and gave the slightest negative shake of his head. He hoped she understood that this _really_ was not the time for heroics.

Just this morning he'd chastised Josh and Kat for their lack of common sense, and complimented himself on his own caution and clear-headedness. But throw one chance to play hero in front of him and he'd run off blindly into danger in the same way that they always did.

Josh and Kat were never, never going to let him to live this one down.

If he lived at all.

"My apologies, Carlie," Lance said with an entirely unapologetic tone. "Berto knows why I'm doin' this. I hope you don't mind following along."

Carlie swallowed and shook her head, still looking breathless.

"Why?" Berto asked anyway, meeting Lance's eyes with what he thought was a fairly convincing display of fearlessness. In reality it was something closer to anger; anger at himself for falling so easily into the situation and for letting Carlie help, and anger at Lance for threatening her.

Lance leaned in, eyes narrowing to glittering slits of anger. In a low voice, designed not to carry, he answered, "Because one stint in Leavenworth was enough."

Lending emphasis to the words was a jab from the knife - not hard enough to break his skin, but hard enough to make Berto understand the importance of getting up. He got up, slowly, and Lance and Carlie rose in unison.

"We're gonna walk out calm," Lance said in that low voice, more to Carlie than to Berto. Berto, after all, he had under control. Another jab from the knife. This one did break the skin; Berto felt a warm trickle of blood sting his side. "No trouble from your friends or you're dead."

"Friends" meant Max and the two other N-Tek agents who'd helped bring Lance and his flying fortress, Javelin, down in the first place. Marshak was retired, Rachel had departed for a destination unknown, and Max was cruising down the New River. None of them were likely to come storming in to his rescue in the near future.

"My friends aren't here," Berto said, carefully navigating through the swinging double doors once again. Outside the restaurant, the crowds hadn't thinned, and the sun hadn't gone down, but a van and a large pickup truck with a shell over its bed had taken up residence at the curb. One of the men in the cab of the truck belonged to Lance's posse. Berto couldn't see the driver of the van but had the feeling they were also with Lance.

"Good," Lance said. "But I'm not of a mood to take chances."

Alarmed in general, but especially by that, Berto twisted around to see what Lance was about to do - but never got to see much of anything, because there was a sharp, burning stab to his neck, and then his vision began to blur at the edges. He put an unsteady hand up to see what had happened to his neck, but halfway there it dropped of its own volition and he couldn't raise it again.

Bad sign, a voice in his head warned. Very bad sign.

Carlie, not restrained by a knife at her side, was nonetheless standing motionless. Berto blinked and tried to focus on her long enough to convey the general idea of: _run like the devil's after you._

" 'Night, Berto," Lance's voice said, oddly muffled and distant. The blurring became swirling blackness, shot through with sparks of rainbow color. A sedative, Berto realized. With some effort, he saw that Lance's hand - not the one with the knife, but the other one - had a syringe in it. The syringe was half-full of a pale red liquid. Lance tucked it away in his jacket just as Berto's knees buckled and only the arms of his attackers kept him from hitting the pavement. It was, he thought with the detached bemusement of the semiconscious, a very fast-acting sedative.

Through the blackness and the sparks, he saw Carlie at last take off running, fleeing along the sidewalk. One of Lance's crew chased after her, and they vanished behind the building where the deserted parking lot waited.

_That's not it,_ he wanted to shout at her; _run_ towards _people. Run_ into _the crowd, not away from it!_ But Carlie was gone and he couldn't really remember how to shout anyway.

The darkness swirled faster and heavier, swallowing the world. The last thing that went through Berto's mind before blacking out altogether had nothing to do with Carlie's safety, or the whereabouts of his teammates, or even his own fate.

No - a manager to the bitter end, his last thought was that he was going to completely miss that mandatory orientation meeting.


	8. Mountaineering 101

Note: The waterfall is based on Cathedral Falls, which, while being closer to Anstead than Fayetteville (ah, that creative license!), is beautiful and majestic; I have climbed all over the thing and taken some photos from near the top that fairly give you vertigo just by looking at 'em. The "path" leading up (and down) is thin, steep, and muddy, and yes, I have wiped out more than once while I was climbing. Some great photos, though.

I just realized that Bridge Day 2004 is in a few weeks, and that I'll have been working on this fic for _three years_ (!) at that point, so, um, I'm gonna try to get it finished before then. Yeah.

* * *

Somewhere in between discovering that the remaining kayaks had "mysteriously" vanished from the riverbank (meaning they'd been stolen, no doubt by some enterprising rafter), and discovering that Ethan didn't have a cell phone either, Trip had lived up to his name.

He'd slipped on a patch of algae-wet rock and wrenched his ankle - just a sprain, Kat and Josh had decided, using their lengthy first-aid emergency medical training, but bad enough to make walking difficult. For once in his life, Ethan Raptor had shown some kind of human feeling and had not only donated his backpack to the makeshift splint, but had taken on the responsibility of acting as a _de facto_ crutch for their hike through the mountains.

They'd washed up on the wrong side of the river to hitch a ride with a CSX coal train - not that Josh thought they could or should flag one down - and apparently, they'd also washed up on the only stretch of West Virginia river that didn't have a miserable, salt-pitted road twisting alongside it. So they'd checked the maps and gone hiking.

"Where's the road again?" Kat asked.

Josh threw her a darkly unamused glance. "On the other side of this mountain."

Which was much steeper than he would've expected, given the low profile of the Appalachian mountain chain. He'd been staring at a sixty-five-degree tilt of a landscape for almost three hours, going at a snail's pace to accommodate Trip's injury. Some patches had even been steep enough to force them to crawl, which was, frankly, demeaning.

"I hate this stupid state," Ethan said with heartfelt venom. He and the much-slowed Trip were some distance behind and below the Team Steel athletes, but Ethan's voice carried. Oh, yeah, it carried. "Nothin' but freakin' trees and rocks. Where _is_ everyone?"

Josh looked over his shoulder and called back, more resigned than exasperated (although he was that, too), "People come here for the scenery, Raptor, not the city lights."

Ethan kept grumbling, but it was drowned out by Trip's strained-but-cheerful, "Hey, I think we're almost there. I can see light and stuff."

Swinging his attention forward again, Josh realized that the steep incline did, in fact, come to an abrupt stop a dozen yards ahead. The ground leveled out and light was shining through the trees near the base of their trunks, instead of the tops of their branches.

"I'll go check it out," Kat said immediately, before Josh could volunteer, and darted up the slope with an energy born of the excruciating boredom of holding back.

Josh waited for Ethan and Trip to close the gap and then began trudging on. Kat had reached what was hopefully the top and came scrambling back down to meet them halfway.

"Nothing up there but a big downhill run. _And_ a road at the bottom," she added, sounding as though she was personally responsible for the road.

"Awesome," Josh said, relieved, at the same time Trip cheered, "All right!" and Ethan snapped, "It's about time!"

Kat flashed a rare, genuine smile - the kind that always made her look positively angelic, and wasn't _that_ the lie of the century - then turned and started climbing again. Josh spared a glance at Trip, already knowing what he'd see, and when he proved himself correct, he refocused on the trail ahead.

The mountainside was mostly dirt and trees, with a heavy underbrush of green weedy plants and a few rock slabs sticking out like broken bones; the fallen leaves coated everything and made climbing a slick and not always certain business, especially given the steep incline. Nevertheless, it was almost too easy to close the last few yards, now that he wasn't trying to wait for Trip and Ethan.

Kat had stopped at the suspected top of the mountain and was waiting, hands on hips. Josh saw why when he caught up with her.

At their feet, plunging straight down into a wide horseshoe of a depression in the mountain, was a waterfall. It certainly wasn't on par with Niagara Falls; for sheer volume, Josh had seen more impressive artificial waterfalls in people's backyard pools. It was a straight drop, however, and it was slimy wet, and it was the shortest way to the road, and it was a pain in the neck that they really didn't need.

"Forgot to mention the obstacle course," he said to her, unconsciously copying her posture as he tried to figure out what the heck they were going to do next.

"It gets worse," she said with a nod to the side. "Check _that_ out."

Josh looked and saw a wall of sheer rock stretching up, up, and up. The beginnings of the waterfall had carved a dripping, slimy channel in the vertical face of the rock, but there were no other indentations or possible handholds to be seen.

"Over there, too," Kat said, gesturing in the opposite direction, where an even more featureless rock face loomed. "So we can either hike up and around or try our luck with the obstacle course."

"That's only, what - seventy, eighty feet down?" Josh asked, peering over the edge of the waterfall. They were actually standing on a shelf of dry rock that jutted out over the wet and slimy part. It looked like a shallow pool of water formed beneath them, then fed the meager waterfall, which cascaded down a series of similar shelves of rock. If they were careful, they could climb down into the pool and wade over to a place where they could climb down to the next shelf of rock, then the next, then the next, and so on. The shelves bulged out towards the last twenty feet, increasing in number but also decreasing in width; that part could be tricky, but by no means impossible. "We could do that."

"But could Trip?" she countered, and gave him an exasperated glare when he shot her a "you-do-too-like-him" look.

"Maybe. If it's pretty easy for us, he should be able to make it. If not, we can hike back up and go around, or flag down a car or something," he said, flinging up his hands at the end. He just wanted to get to the road and back to civilization. The unscheduled deviation from their plans had been worrying him endlessly, and he was starting to feel the first twinges of the fatigue that came with being low on t-juice. Not surprising - they'd been hiking all over West Virginia, and been in a very tense situation before that; both physical and psychological stressors burned him out these days.

Kat looked skeptical, but he chalked it up to her paranoid-street-girl nature and called back to Ethan and Trip, "We're going to try to climb down! Stay here until we find out if it's safe!"

Ethan accepted that as graciously as he did anything, which was: Not very. "If I hear any creepy banjo music, I'm out of here, got it?"

"Be careful!" Trip added.

Kat waved in response, and then they began to climb down the waterfall. Although the water, the slime-covered rocks, and the admittedly daunting height made it somewhat more challenging, the descent was comparatively easy - almost embarrassingly so - when stacked against their wilder spy missions, and Josh felt another flush of humiliation at being stuck in the situation.

"This is undignified," he told her.

"No, this is a broken neck waiting to happen," she said, trying to get a secure foothold on the next downward shelf, which of course was wet, slimy, and sloping to boot.

Josh agreed. They had no climbing gear, no safety gear - not even helmets, which had been left in the mine. Desire for expediency aside, the small, nagging part of him that kept up with such concerns took over, and he started searching for an alternative.

He edged out from the waterfall, leaned around a jutting, slickly mossy boulder, and found what he was looking for.

"That way," he said, pointing. "It looks like there's a trail we can take down and maybe hold off on the broken necks."

The trail was a razor-thin strip of foliage-free ground that angled away from the waterfall before plunging down the mountainside at a wicked angle; not ninety degrees, but close to it. It was slick with mud and fragments of shale, and looked about as stable as either of the Barkowski siblings.

"Huh. Muddy shale," Kat said, eyeing it with a faint look of disgust. "What a _surprise_."

Josh heaved a sigh of the long-suffering and began to gingerly pick his way down the trail, using the few tough, spindly trees as handholds. "Come on."

He'd gone all of a yard when the shale fragments beneath his left foot slipped sideways and he lost his balance. Kat grabbed for one of his arms, evidently in an effort to keep him upright, but her footing was none too stable either and all she accomplished was getting pulled down with him. That left him even more uncentered than before, and the end result was a very unwelcome and unplanned slide down the cold, muddy, rocky slope for both of them.

Josh kept a grip on his teammate, reached out with one hand and snagged a jutting rock that was anchored into the mountain, but was every bit as slimy as the trail; his fingers slipped off almost as soon as they caught hold. It nearly wrenched his arm out of its socket, but he'd managed to shed some momentum. Instead of sliding all the way down the trail, they came to a grudging stop about halfway. A few stray shale fragments kept going in a gentle, plinking avalanche.

Kat groaned and pushed herself to a sitting position, extricating herself from the inadvertent two-person dogpile with no small amount of jostling to her partner. "Ouch. I coulda done without _that_... You okay, McGrath?"

Josh McGrath, aka Max Steel, was a multimillion dollar secret agent, the most advanced and unique organism in the world - a nearly flawless blend of nanomachines and human daring. He regularly saved large chunks of the world from destruction and chaos, busted bad guys, and generally did all the kinds of larger-than-life stunts that heroes did.

But right now, he was covered in mud and bits of rock flake, had been trapped in a mine all morning, had hiked on foot all afternoon, had lost two state-of-the-art kayaks to an unknown thief, and had just fallen down the side of a mountain because he, the extreme athlete and superspy, had slipped on wet rock.

He couldn't help it; it was too absurd. He started laughing.

"Guess not. What's _your_ malfunction?" Kat asked, giving him an arch look as she brushed at a streak of mud on her face.

"Nothing," he said, waving the question away without quite stopping his laughter. "Nothing, just - what a day!"

She snorted, but it was more amused than disdainful. "Yeah, what a day."

Inexplicably feeling better, he hauled himself to his feet and, once certain that he was properly braced, stuck a hand out to help her up too. "If I had to fall down a mountain with anyone, Kat, you'd be my first choice."

She accepted his hand and the compliment graciously, then spoiled it with a wink and a grinning, "You're just saying that so I won't tell all the guys on the circuit about your wipeout."

He was, but that wasn't the point. "Go ahead," he said, flippant, as they gingerly picked their way down the remainder of the trail to where it terminated in a boulder-choked pool of calm water. "I'll tell them about your X-Files moment."

"Would not," she countered.

"Would too, Scully." He debated jumping over the pool and decided to wade right through it; with any luck the water would get rid of some of the mud. He didn't count on the water being ice cold - much, much colder than the river. "Whoa!" he exclaimed, entirely involuntarily.

Kat splashed in with an indrawn hiss of breath, then ducked under the water until she was completely submerged. It lasted all of two seconds and then she came up gasping and shaking her head; water flew everywhere, including at Josh, who was not appreciative of the shower.

Sometimes - make that _most_ of the time - he did not understand his partner at all. "What was that about?"

"Mud in my hair." She pushed her wet and thoroughly mud-free hair out of her face, gave him a critical glance, and added, "Same deal for you."

He finished slogging across the pool and climbed out on the other side before she could get any smart ideas. "The great thing is, as a guy, I don't have to care."

"Chicken," she said, before shouting up at the waterfall, "Yo! Raptor! Climb down, but watch your feet!"

"Okay!" came the response from Trip - and then Ethan's familiar whine started up as the two other athletes began picking their way down the face of the waterfall, with Kat giving additional supervisory directions to her puppy and his master.

Josh ignored it all and focused instead on the cheerful thought that only a car ride lay between him and freedom from Team Raptor in all its forms.

Of course, a car ride in West Virginia was not necessarily something to look forward to. Team Steel had been in a competition in Atlanta before hitting Bridge Day, and rather than pay for airfare, they'd driven up on the Interstate. That had been fine - they were making good time, the weather was okay, the roads mostly clear - until the Interstate turned into the West Virginia Turnpike.

They called their primary transportation a van but it was more accurately a bus, and although it handled a far sight better than most vehicles its size, it had not been designed for high-speed travel on narrow, winding mountain roads with semi trucks doing eighty (nevermind the signs declaring they could go no faster than fifty-five) blowing past on one side, and a drop of hundreds of feet on the other. What with the helpful light rain that had begun falling as soon as they passed through the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel, it had been a white-knuckle ride even for Josh, and _he_ was supposed to be the daredevil adrenaline junkie. Plus he'd had to pay a buck fifty at each toll station.

So it was with a less-than-charitable attitude that Josh picked his way through the boulders and the scrubby grass that separated the waterfall pool and the two-lane road, which appeared to be a smaller and more unkempt version of the Turnpike. The far side of the road sprouted a guardrail and a thin strip of weeds, gravel, and trash before summarily dropping off into oblivion.

The sun was starting to get close to the uneven, unbroken ridge of the mountaintop across the valley, which added a new worry to Josh's list: hitchhiking on this road after dark. If that happened, it seemed a forgone conclusion that his crummy day would end in a fatal car accident.

"I need to listen to Berto more," Josh said to no one, then, because he was thinking about it, tried the biolink again. It came back with the flat dull hiss of an empty line, just as it had all afternoon. Not unexpected, but annoying anyway.

He checked to see how Trip and Ethan were doing - a third of the way down, _and_ Kat was chewing Ethan out for not being careful, so that was a bonus - before stepping out into the road and looking for a car. _Praying_ for a car.

An hour later, when he'd forked over his extra candy bar to Ethan in a futile effort to stop the complaining, and Trip had said "like" for the six hundredth time, and Kat had all but cleared the ground of small rocks by slinging them across the road and into the valley beyond, Josh was fairly sure that not only were his prayers going unanswered, they were being actively mocked.

_Please,_ he thought. _Just let _one thing_ go right today. Just one. Just get me back to Fayetteville before I lose it, and I swear I'll..._

"Hey, what's that?" Trip asked suddenly, pointing down the road.

Josh squinted at the distant flash of light and, boosted just the slightest bit by nanoprobes, was relieved to see salvation. "It's a car!"

As far as godsends went, it wasn't the most awe-inspiring: a full-size, rusty black van, held together by bumper stickers advertising what looked to be every single band that had ever performed in the Southern United States. But it was running, and it pulled over, and the passenger window rolled down, revealing two men who were much more clean-shaven than the van indicated.

"Hey there," the driver said, giving them a wave and a friendly grin. "Y'all stranded?"

"What does it look like?" Ethan snapped, scowling. Kat gave him a discreet but painful elbow to the ribs; Josh made a mental note to thank her later for her many valiant efforts to inflict punishment on Ethan Raptor.

"We could use a ride to Fayetteville," Josh told the driver. "And I mean, _really_ use a ride."

"Well, climb on in and find a seat. We're playing there all weekend. Bluegrass," he added, clearly very proud of his genre.

The invitation was met with enthusiastic thanks by the extreme athletes, even Ethan, who was by his own (loud, shrill, repeated) admission very sick of hanging around with Team Steel. They all clambered inside the van, somehow managing to fit around the loads of musical equipment already in place. The man in the passenger seat rescued a guitar case before Trip could put his big feet all over it.

"It's a mandolin," he told Josh, who had claimed the spot in between the back of the driver's seat and the smallest amplifier. "It's worth more than this van."

"I believe _that_," Ethan said from the back seat, followed quickly by a muffled, "Ow!" and a vituperative, "Quit _hitting_ me, Ryan!"

"Quit _making_ me."

"Whoa, guys, be cool, okay?"

"Shut up, Trip."

"Way to talk to your teammate, Raptor."

"_You _need to shut - Ow!"

Josh groaned and rubbed his forehead, trying to dispell not only the headache but the lower-grade, full-body ache of lost transphasic energy. He no longer wanted to have fun in the West Virginia wilderness; he wanted to get back to the van, plug in the generator, eat a hot, unhealthy meal, and complain to Berto. "This day will not end."

"Don't worry," the driver said, putting the engine in gear and easing back onto the road. "We'll be in Fayetteville before you know it."

Fifteen minutes later, the engine sputtered, coughed, and died.

"Oops," the driver said. "Looks like we're out of gas."

"That's gonna be a hike, getting to the nearest station," the mandolin player said, in the detached tones of someone discussing the weather. "Could take hours."

"_Hours?_" Josh demanded, while Ethan launched into complaints and Kat turned to start a new conversation with Trip, wherein he would no doubt say "like" a few dozen more times.

"Hours," the driver confirmed, nodding.

Josh put his head down and did his best not to scream.


	9. Country Roads

Notes: The chapter title comes from John Denver's unforgettable ode to WV, "Take Me Home, Country Roads," also called "Country Roads," and probably the only song about WV to ever make it onto the charts. Anywho, these are my favorite lines: _All my memories gathered 'round her/Miner's lady, stranger to blue water. _It's purty, ain't it? :)

* * *

"Berto! Berto, wake up, please!" a voice said somewhere far above him, and yet it was near enough to drive spikes of pain into his head with every syllable. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut more tightly, trying to block it out, trying to drop back into the darkness where, if he remembered correctly, his head didn't hurt quite so much.

"Berto! _Please_! Come on, come on - we're in big trouble!"

He groaned again and got out, "_Baje su volumen_," before his brain caught up with his tongue and realized that the voice was speaking _ingles_, not _español_. He was fairly sure that he recognized that voice. Who -?

He cautiously opened one eye and, finding that it didn't increase the pain in his head, opened the other one. His vision was skewed, and it took a second to process that it was because his glasses were crooked. Also, he was lying on the floor. Also, the floor was moving. Jolting, more accurately. That fit with what he could see of his immediate surroundings: he was in the back of a pickup truck with a hard shell over its bed. Cardboard boxes were stacked to the roof all around him, reducing the available floor space to a few cramped square feet.

"Berto, oh thank God," the voice said, with unhidden relief. There was movement behind him and then a face swung into his peripherial vision, and everything snapped back together in a rush of memory that did absolutely nothing to make his headache go away.

Fayetteville. The trade show. Carlie. The restaurant. Lance. The sedative -

"Carlie," he said. His tongue felt two sizes too big for his mouth, and dry as paper besides. He swallowed a few times, which helped a little, then asked, "Where are we?"

"A truck," she answered, swinging in and out of his field of vision as the truck jolted along. "They put us in here about thirty minutes ago, I think. I was only just waking up myself."

Berto struggled to something approximating a sitting position. It was actually more uncomfortable than lying down, what with the jolting and the boxes and all, and it left him with the realization that his hands were tied behind his back - too tightly; they'd gone all but numb - but at least he could see Carlie better. "Are you okay?"

She nodded in the near-dark of the truck. Somewhere, somehow, she'd picked up a large, swollen purple bruise on her jaw, and it looked like it hurt her to talk. Other than that, and the fact that her hands were also tied behind her back, she appeared to be unharmed. She still had on her hi-I'm-a-tourist baseball cap, which reassured him for some reason. "I'm fine. They just knocked me out the old-fashioned way."

He had several questions to ask and they were all of equal importance, making it difficult to prioritize, especially with his headache. After a moment he gave up and went with the one that should be easiest to answer. "Do you know what time it is?"

"No," she said, glancing at the small, grimy windows in the truck shell, which had been completely obscured by a coat of white paint. No light was filtering in from outside. "It's dark outside, I know that."

"I should have a watch," he said, raising his bound hands slightly. He prayed hard and fast that he _did_ have a watch, that Lance and his henchmen hadn't removed it, that Lance's arrogance would win out over his caution.

If he had a watch, he had a way for Max and Kat to track him. If he had a watch, they had a way to get out of here alive. If he had a watch, he would go to Mass every Sunday from now on and really, really mean it when he said his Ave Maria.

Carlie leaned over to peer behind him, taking a very long time to do something so simple. Finally, she said, "You do."

Berto closed his eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. "Can you - There's a button on the side, a red one. Hold it down for three seconds."

"Okay," she said, but the agreement was dubious at best. "I'll have to turn around and somehow... This could take a minute. Hang on."

It took something like four minutes of Carlie's fingers fumbling around his numb wrist, during which time the truck came to an absolute stop twice and voices shouted over the engine noise. Each time Berto experienced a fresh wave of desperation and kicked himself all over again. Nevermind the doctorate; only an idiot would have tried to confront a terrorist with no backup, and only an idiot would have allowed that terrorist to take him hostage. Again. And this time he didn't have an entire spy agency looking for him. He didn't have _anyone_ looking for him.

What had Carlie said? _"That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard." _ He decided that he needed to listen to her advice more often.

"Ta-da!" she finally exclaimed in a stage whisper. "So... what did I just do?"

"Activated a tracking signal." He twisted around again in the confined space of the truck bed and faced her with what he hoped was a confident and resolute expression. "Now my friends can find us."

Or their decaying bodies.

He felt better regardless.

"No offense, but I don't know if McGrath and Ryan can take our 'hosts' either," Carlie said, tossing her head back in an evident attempt to get a strand of hair out of her face. "The jerks who tossed me in here were packing major firepower. Not hillbilly shotguns - I mean, Kalishnakov rifles and top-of-the-line pulse-laser guns and stuff."

Berto looked at her askance.

She shrugged and said, "I'm Ethan Raptor's manager," as though that was supposed to explain everything, which it probably did.

"Josh and Kat can handle a lot more than you might think," he told her, and didn't have to feign his confidence this time. He believed in his _hermano_ and teammate, believed because he'd seen them in action and knew what they could do.

"I sure hope so." Carlie gave up on the hair with an impatient huff and leaned back against the boxes. "What about that Max guy, the one who rescued Ethan? He hangs out with your team - I've seen him at other competitions."

"Max... comes and goes," Berto said, hedging, grateful for the poor light. Jeremy McGrath might have gotten onto the insider short list through similar circumstances, but Berto wasn't willing to jeopardize Josh's secret ID now unless he had no other choice. It was bad enough that Carlie could link Max back to Team Steel, even with all of their precautions. "I don't know if he's available for a rescue mission right now."

Carlie made a noncommital noise and slumped a little, ducking her head down so that Berto couldn't see her face below the bill of the baseball cap. "We're going to die, aren't we?"

Berto wanted to say, "No, my crazy spy friends are going to save us," or even, "I think I can talk Lance out of it," but at the last moment his will to paint a rosy picture evaporated. He sighed and confessed, "Probably."

"It's okay," she said, voice small and wavering but still somehow holding a glimmer of humor. "I hear a lot of first dates suck."

So it _was_ a date. And it was indeed sucking thus far... but it _was_ a date. Berto cleared his throat and managed a weak, "Ah, yeah. I guess."

The truck saved him from further response by hitting a particularly mammoth bump in the road, if they were even on a road. One of the boxes at the top of the stacks slipped sideways, was caught by gravity, and toppled over. The top had been taped shut, but the seam split when it hit the truck bed and the contents came tumbling out, sliding down the bed to rest at Berto's feet. Six good-sized packages of chunky off-white putty, wrapped tight in clear plastic, and an equal number of small electronic devices with blank LED dispplays and two tiny lights.

Green light, red light, plastic explosive.

Berto said something under his breath that had absolutely nothing to do with hailing Mary.

"Oh no," Carlie said. "That's -"

"How Lance is going to spend his night," Berto cut in, talking over her. "He and his militia buddies -"

He stopped and she finished the sentence with a soft, horrified, "Are going to blow up the bridge. My God. All those people..."

They stared at each other for a long moment, united both by increased fear and renewed sense of purpose. The continued lives of two hundred and fifty thousand innocent people were entirely dependent on them. So what if they were team managers and not professional spies?

They were just going to have to make do.

"Carlie," Berto said, "I think I have a plan, but you might have to run for it."

He expected her to refuse, and in fact she opened her mouth with every visible intention to do so, but before she could get a word out the truck came to a final lurching halt. The engine cut off, a door squealed open on rusty hinges, then slammed shut, and footsteps and low voices began to congregate around the back of the truck.

Berto sat up straighter and wished his glasses weren't crooked and his hands weren't numb.

The whitewashed rear window suddenly lifted up, and the tailgate came down with a metallic bang. It sounded rather like a gunshot - not the best of omens. Standing around outside were at least six militiamen, and all of them were armed, Lance Breamer included. None of them looked like they wanted to undo their captives' restraints, apologize politely for the inconvenience, and invite them over for a very late tea.

"Everybody out," Lance ordered, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the encompassing darkness. A faint roar of traffic drifted down from the only available source of light: Cars driving across the hulking black span of the New River Gorge Bridge.

"Where are we?" Carlie asked, doing her best to climb out of the truck unaided. Berto was less enthusiastic about following orders, but didn't think he had much choice.

"Where else, little lady?" Lance grinned, teeth flashing white in the black shadows. "End of the road."


	10. Phone Tag

Note: So, like, less than a week after I got my ears pierced, I went in for surgery (who needs tonsils?) and of course had to remove the earrings from my swollen, sensitive, one-bacterium-away-from-infected earlobes; the backs stuck to the posts and I, being only seven, couldn't bring myself to tug hard enough to pull them free. My mom had to literally yank them out, and then the nurses had to bring me cotton swabs and antiseptic for the oozing, bleeding holes. I think that hurt more than the actual surgery. This is also why I stopped at one piercing per ear.

* * *

By the time Josh keyed in the security code and practically tore open the van's door, it had been full dark for at least three or four hours. His watch was telling him that that was because it was almost ten o'clock at night. A two-hour drive had somehow, without the aid of radioactive particles, hideously mutated into five. The best thing Josh could say about it was that he'd gotten a free roadside concert while the mandolin player had hiked to the nearest gas station and back. Too bad he wasn't a fan of bluegrass.

"Thanks for the ride!" he called to their good Samaritans, who honked back enthusiastically before chugging out of the hotel parking lot.

"Move it," Kat said, pushing past him and clambering up the short metal steps. "I have _got_ to get these earrings out."

"We're _still_ talking about the earrings?" he asked her, following her in and shutting the door firmly behind them. "Hey, Berto! You home, bro?"

He got silence for an answer to both his questions - silence and the door of van's ridiculously small bathroom banging against the wall.

"Guess not," he muttered, rotating his shoulder and grimacing slightly. It still ached from the impromptu mountain slide, and being trapped in a vehicle with Ethan hadn't made it feel any better. Team Raptor was at another hotel, one further down the road than Team Steel's, and Josh reveled in the distance of several city blocks between himself and _that voice_.

He made his way into the ridiculously small living room/dining room and saw no evidence that Berto had been there since breakfast - no food, no DVDs, no computer junk spread out all over the place. The trade show must have indeed kept him busy all day, but the trade show _had_ to be done by ten, right?

Josh grabbed his cell phone from its unofficial resting place in a cupholder and hit Berto's number on speed dial. There was no need to worry, he was almost positive of that; Berto had probably found an all-night buffet or something -

A sudden "Ow!" from the bathroom made him pause in mid-thought and stick his head around the corner, concerned. "Kat?"

"Ow, ow, ow! These stupid things - they might as well be welded to my head!"

Sensing that anything along the line of "I told you so" might prove to be fatal, Josh went instead with a vaguely patronizing, "Just don't break anything, okay?"

She started to come back with something snarled and surly, but the exact details were lost when the phone at Josh's ear rang through to Berto's voice message. Josh hung up, thought for a moment, and then dialed his own voice mailbox to see if there was a message from their missing teammate.

There wasn't, but there _were_ a few from some other people.

The very brief message ("Joshua. Call me when you get the water out of your ears.") from his father scared him the most, especially the part where Jefferson had used his full first name. The four from the trade show organizers confused him - _he_ didn't know why the N-Tek booth had been closed from three o'clock on, either. The two from the orientation meeting, both with the same irritated voice asking where the devil was anyone from the N-Tek jump group? - those made him worry.

"Kat, we might have a problem," he said, hanging up and hazarding an approach to the bathroom. "And it's not your earrings."

She gave him the beginning of a really good death glare in the mirror, but his worry must have shown because the evil eye vanished just as quickly as it'd appeared. "Why? Where's Berto?"

"I dunno, but he hasn't been at the trade show since three and he never showed at the orientation meeting."

She reached up and gingerly touched the metal rings in her wounded ear, clearly mulling things over. He had to admit that the ear looked bad; what had been puffy and red at eleven in the morning was bruised and swollen and - green? was it actually _green_? - at ten at night. "That's not good."

He rested his hands on his hips and tried to neither gag at her ear nor let the worry for Berto show overmuch. "Yeah."

"So... what are we gonna do?"

He was going to answer, say something about firing up the computer and locating Berto's tracking device, when his cell phone shrilled. Josh flipped it open quickly, hoping to hear Berto on the other end. "Hello?"

"Oh, hey, Josh," Trip said. "Is Carlie there?"

Josh pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it as though it might be a secret DREAD device, planted by Psycho in the hopes of utterly destroying his every chance at a life free from Team Raptor. The logo of the cell company stared at him impassively, denying it all. He reluctantly returned the phone to his head and said, "No, why?"

"Oh. She's like, not here, and she left a note saying something about the trade show, and like N-Tek and stuff, and we thought maybe... I dunno."

In the background Josh heard Ethan griping, quite clearly, about how if Carlie was so hot to join the other side, maybe they didn't want her for a manager after all.

Trip responded to that with a mild, "Dude, be cool," which apparently was the closest thing to a rebuke or an insult that a loyal puppy like Trip could make.

"Hang on," Josh said to everyone on the other end of the line, then put his hand over the receiver - over the whole phone, actually - and turned an accusatory glare on Kat. "Trip Thompson has my cell phone number?"

"Mine got trashed?" she reminded him, folding her arms across her chest. "What's he want?"

"No," Josh told her, "I won't make that joke. It's beneath me."

The evil eye returned full force. With the ear and the scowl, she looked a fair bit more intimidating than usual. Almost like a creature from a horror movie. Which he was totally not going to tell her, because he wanted to make it out of the van alive.

He relented on the heckling and cut to the chase: "He wants to know if we've seen Carlie, 'cause they can't find her."

Her eyebrow went up sharply, and Josh knew for certain that she was thinking the exact same thing that he was - if Fate had thrown Josh and Ethan together all day, then It had probably brought Carlie into Berto's orbit as well. Only fair to spread things around. "Berto's missing, Carlie's missing - ten bucks they're missing together."

"Gotcha." He uncovered the phone and resumed his conversation with the patiently waiting Trip. "I think she's with Berto. We're gonna go pick him up now."

"Oh, okay, cool," Trip said, relieved and happy all at once. "Hey, can I talk to K-"

Josh closed the phone and ended the connection. "Whoops," he said brightly.

"_That_ was rude."

"What's up with _you_ turning into Miss Manners all of a sudden?"

"Would you just go find Berto before we all die of old age?"

Josh turned to walk the three big steps to Berto's computer, calling, "You _do_ like him."

"What if I do?" she called back, and even though it was laden with sarcasm, the question brought him up short. What if she did?

Then it was none of his business, he decided, and moved on to the more important matter of tracking down Berto before he could let what was none of his business bother him.

Berto had designed the trackers, and built them into watches that all three Team Steel members wore. The mountains might interfere with the signals, but Josh could always order an N-Tek satellite to swing over the state - Max Steel could do stuff like that if he felt like it, and nevermind the important research the satellite was tasked for in the first place - and that would do the trick.

It would also alert Jefferson Smith, so Josh was hoping he wouldn't need to use a satellite.

The tracker program was on the same computer that ran the biolink, and that was on Berto's laptop. Josh had never tried to actually use it, but he'd seen it done enough times that he didn't think it would be a problem. The laptop was on Berto's bunk, right next to the portable transphasic regenerator. Josh glanced at the latter wistfully, but he _really_ didn't know how to run that; somehow, whenever he was in a position to observe it in operation, he was kinda more focused on _living_. Berto first, T-juice second.

"I still think he's at a buffet," Josh said under his breath while he powered up the computer. His bro loved free and/or cheap food like most people loved oxygen. But it wouldn't hurt to check.

He found the program easily enough and managed to decipher the technogeek, at least partly, and from there it was simple to get the program to look for Berto. Josh zoomed in on the resulting coordinates, trying to see where he was, but all the program would show was where the tracker had _been_. Current location unknown; last position... just beside the parallel lines of the bridge.

After a bit of effort, Josh finagled the machine into showing him the tracker's path for the entire time it had been turned on. That proved to be a very short arc indeed, but it went unerringly for the side of the bridge. And then the signal was lost. Not terminated - lost. The computer insisted the tracker was still on, but that it couldn't triangulate Berto's position.

Josh was not exactly an academic, but he knew the general story of how signals were transmitted, and he knew how they could be blocked. Several tons of steel would block anything the tracker could put out - but only if Berto was directly beneath it.

"I got the earrings out," Kat reported, leaning against the door and jingling her jewelry in one fisted hand. Her ear was now bruised, swollen, and very naked. She still looked like she could be in a horror flick. Maybe as an extra instead of the featured monster.

Josh turned the laptop so she could see the monitor and the glowing green trail of dots. "I found Berto. He was headed for the New River Gorge Bridge when his tracker's signal was blocked, and he's still there."

They exchanged a look that did a number of things all at once: indicated their shared concern for Berto, tabled indefinitely the petty bickering, and instantly erased the weariness of their very long day.

"Bikes are fueled and ready to go," she said, pushing off of the doorframe and unceremoniously tossing her precious earrings in her own bunk.

Josh stood and left the laptop running, retrieving his grappling gun from his backpack and following Kat to the rear of the van, where the motorbikes were stored. "I just wish I had time to recharge."

"I seriously doubt Berto has gotten himself into the kind of trouble Max can't handle at half-charge."

Josh tapped his watch and concentrated, briefly, then felt the nanoprobes do their thing and stopped being Josh for a while. "It's been known to happen," Max told Kat. Before her time, mostly (there _had_ been that space escapade with Dragonelle), but it'd been known to happen.

"In Fayetteville, West Virginia?" She hit the button that lowered the rear door, which also handily served as a ramp, while Max grabbed the two bikes closest to hand.

"_We_ seem to be getting into enough," he pointed out. He climbed onto his bike and she tossed him a helmet, which he caught without looking even in full dark and at half-power.

"True. And for the record, Steel, since you're so interested in _my_ business," she said, tugging on her helmet and flipping the visor down, "I do not like Trip. That much."

Max slid on his own helmet and revved the bike's engine. "Good, great, fantastic. Let's go."


	11. 876 Feet To Go

Note: "Taste of Bridge Day" is a real festival, and the bridge really does have a catwalk beneath it. Honestly, I only needed to make up a few things for this fic. Y'know, like geography and amazing coincidences and stuff. Also, I'd like to send a shout-out to my cousin Steve, who's actually a lawyer. (Not all'a us mountaineers are rednecks, y'know.)

The official Bridge Day website, which coincidentally includes the phrases "www," "officialbridgeday," and "dot-com," has photos galore and more details than you'll ever need.

There's just one chapter left after this, but before we get there, we have a lot of excitement to wade through. And here we go -!

* * *

It was too dark to see the river except as a faint moonlight twinkle, or a pale ridge of white water where it curled up around rocks. That was because the river was eight hundred and seventy-six feet down, and Berto was not inclined to spend more than a cursory moment looking at it through the girders of the bridge.

"C'mon, little buddy," Lance said, sharply prodding his back just above his bound hands. "Time's wastin', and we've got places to go, things to do, etcetera. The boys are gonna need my help here in a minute."

"The boys," aka six desperately radical militiamen, had been unloading the boxes of plastic explosives from the truck the last Berto saw of them. Unskilled labor, no doubt, with Lance as the brains. "Need your help with what?" Berto asked anyway.

"Science project. Applied physics," Lance said blithely. It earned a guffaw from the militia thug escorting Carlie; he had more tattoos than teeth and probably didn't know what applied physics was in the first place.

Berto knew. He also knew that being dragged out onto the catwalk beneath the bridge had pretty effectively blocked the signal from his tracking device, if it was still broadcasting.

_If_ it was broadcasting in the first place.

It probably was; he'd built it, and he built things to last. Still - he had no idea what Lance had done to it while he was unconscious.

"This is far enough," Lance announced, bringing Berto to an ungentle halt and setting down their only source of illumination, a hooded camping lantern. They weren't anywhere near the middle of the bridge, which was something over three thousand feet long, but they were more than far enough out for a fatal plunge. "Nice view, huh?"

Carlie said, "Some sunlight would help."

Lance made a regretful clucking noise. "That's not gonna happen. See, Berto, I gotta tie up all the loose ends. My cousin Steve in particular gets nervous about loose ends, don't you, Cousin Steve?"

"Loose ends is how the gov'ment steals a man's_ freedom_," Cousin Steve said. He punctuated the statement by spitting off the bridge and giving Carlie, also bound, a rough shove forward. Irony, it seemed, was an art lost on Lance's extended family.

"We're real serious about keeping our freedom," Lance agreed.

"You don't have to do this," Berto said, slightly desperate.

Lance looked at him for a moment, face cast in shadows that sprang from other sources than the darkness of the night. "Yeah, I really do."

Then he put a hand on Berto's chest and shoved.

Berto had no time to react, and fell with a metal-jarring thump that echoed across the girders. He landed on his side - still on the catwalk, thank God - and had enough freedom of movement to glance up and back, just in time to see Lance stride forward with a knife in hand. Carlie made a muffled, strangled shriek, but Berto found he couldn't say anything at all.

Lance knelt beside him, raised the blade - and sliced through the duct tape around his wrists with one quick motion.

Blood instantly rushed into his hands, along with a thousand sharp pains as the nerves came back to life. He was too grateful for sensation to care.

Cousin Steve cut Carlie's hands loose too, but kept a firm grip on the junction of her neck and shoulder.

Lance hauled him to his feet, pushing him into the railing, and clapped a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was just a shade too rough to be friendly. "Tell me, Berto, do you know why they started having Bridge Day in the first place?"

He glanced down again at the dark, dark void and the impossibly tiny river at its bottom and tried not to notice the ominous way the wind whistled through the maze of girders, or the slight, constant shaking from passing traffic. People jumped _off_ of this? He didn't even want to be _on_ it. Of course, most of his aversion came from the fact that a sociopath was standing next to him. "I forget."

"Look at it," Lance said, gesturing with his free hand at the steel beams all around them. "The second-highest bridge in America. Second-longest steel arch bridge in the world. Over forty million pounds of steel. Never rusts, never needs painting, built in under five years. A marvel of engineering and construction. What BASE nut could resist?"

It was a rhetorical question, so Berto didn't answer. Kat's phrase - _"Because it's there"_ - came back, but sarcasm seemed to be too risky an option at this juncture.

"Back in the day, you see, they had a lot of bandit jumpers," Lance went on. "Folks came out here in the dead of night, sneaking around to avoid the police and the park rangers. Not all of them made it back to Fayetteville, if you get my drift."

Berto knew that. He'd done his research, after all, and the numbers of fatalities had stuck with him, small though it was. Lance was exaggerating slightly; only three people total had died, and only one of them was bandit jumping. At the time of his research, he'd been mostly concerned with the actual Bridge Day deaths, and the resulting probability that anything would happen to his team. "Let me guess. My name is about to be added to the list."

Lance laughed again, this time in genuine appreciation. "I know, I know - not very intellectual of me, just to chuck you off a bridge. But I'm not a man to argue with results."

"The ends justify the means," Berto said, somewhat flatly, and Lance slapped his back. The impact made Berto sway forward, bending slightly over the rail, and he had to take a quick and nauseating step backward to avoid being thrown off-balance altogether.

"Exactly! It's a shame you keep ticking me off, Martinez, 'cause the two of us - whew! We could rule the world."

Steady again, Berto got a good hold on the rail and checked the thin black watch strapped to his wrist. A light pulsed slow green next to the digital numbers; it was still transmitting, but, as he'd feared, hopelessly blocked.

He hoped Josh and Kat didn't confuse a blocked signal with no signal. His _hermano_, while being a technology marvel himself, wasn't exactly tech-savvy. Kat was a little better, but not enough to make Berto feel supremely confident. It didn't take very long to plunge to your death.

At any rate, Josh and Kat weren't there. Time to try to save himself - for a change.

Berto found Carlie's eyes - or at least the glint of her glasses lenses - and nodded marginally, with the unspoken message, _Get ready_. He couldn't tell if she could see him in the darkness.

He turned back to their villainous host and asked with false confidence, "Since when is blowing up the New River Gorge Bridge going to help you rule the world?"

_That_ startled Lance, and his stocky face went from good-natured to suspicious in a second. "Who said I'm gonna blow up the bridge?"

"I saw the plastic explosives in the truck. And it's the only reason you'd be out here," Berto said, now feigning calm too. "So many people and cameras - not anywhere a wanted fugitive would hang out by choice. You're going to blow up the bridge during the jumping, aren't you? Get even?"

Lance didn't do anything for a moment, then shook his head slowly. "Berto, Berto, Berto. You're smart and dumb at the same time. Yeah, we're gonna blow up the bridge. The boys broke me out of jail for this gig, and I intend to accomplish my goal. Should be one mother of an explosion, too."

"Heck yeah," Cousin Steve interrupted, displaying his lack of teeth and overall dental care. Carlie flinched away from the general vicinity of the man's face.

Lance flashed a return grin, then finished, "But I'm not doin' it for revenge."

He'd suspected as much. Lance was petty and vindictive, but above all, he loved power, and he loved planes. "You're doing it for money."

"Do you have any idea how much it cost to build Javelin?" was the only answer, and delivered more forlornly than might've been expected. "I'm gonna have to spend the rest of my life being a miserable, stupid terrorist just so I can get my baby bird in the sky again."

He'd used Javelin to skyjack cutting-edge planes, including military aircraft, N-Tek's Behemoth, and a space shuttle. Berto didn't see how that was better than being a "stupid terrorist," but he guessed it made sense to Lance. "Maybe if you hadn't used it as a weapon, you'd still have it."

"Yeah. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, as my mama used to say." Lance put a hand on his shoulder again, this time clamping down hard enough to make Berto wince slightly. "But I bet you can appreciate that right about now, can't you, Dr. Martinez?"

"Lance," Cousin Steve said suddenly, getting everyone's attention. He had a miniature walkie-talkie pressed to one ear with the hand that wasn't grinding Carlie's clavicle into her scapula. "There's some kinda trouble at the trucks. Some girl's showed up, says she's lost."

"She British?" Lance asked, shooting a suspicious glance at Berto and obviously thinking of Rachel.

Cousin Steve mumbled something into the communication device and came back with a puzzled, "Naw, but she's wearin' a wetsuit or somethin' crazy."

Berto's heart skipped a beat. Wetsuit? Fortuitous arrival? Crazy? _Kat_.

And wherever Kat was, Josh couldn't be too far behind... and Josh brought Max with him. His optimism came surging back.

Oblivious, Cousin Steve went on: "Boys are gonna bring her out here and -"

"No! Go take care of it _now_!" Lance cut in, fury rising up from nowhere. Cousin Steve wisely opted to do as told and took off down the catwalk, boots clanging and rattling the metal. Lance fixed Carlie in place with a threatening glare, then turned to Berto and snarled, "Thought your _friends_ weren't here."

"Well, _my_ mother used to say, 'Keep your friends close,' " Berto told him, not quite able to hide his triumph, " 'and your enemies closer.' "

Shouting and gunfire back at the trucks announced that Kat had been joined by someone else. A ringing declaration of "_going turbo!_" gave Berto a really good hint as to who.

"Too clever by half, Berto. Now I'm gonna have to kill you faster. 'Fore your buddies get here and all. You understand."

Berto swallowed. "I don't suppose I could talk you out of it."

"Nope. I wish I could say I'm sorry for this, darlin'," Lance said, striding down the catwalk towards Carlie, "but the truth is you two asked for it. I don't care much for Berto, but you're cute enough, I guess, so I hope they manage to fish your body out of the river before the critters get to it."

"Thanks but no thanks, _jerk_," she said, pulling a slim, black rectangle from an inner pocket of her jacket. Another overlooked item, like the tracer watch, only even more obvious; Lance really _was_ getting sloppy. And Carlie was getting to the end of her false bravado, as evidenced by the rather weak, "Stop right there!" she issued instead of bolting for it.

Lance didn't stop. He closed the distance, reached out and snatched the object out of her hand. She jumped backwards and turned to run, but Lance stepped in front of her and blocked her easily. "A stun gun? _Please_. What is this, amateur night?"

Not even a stun gun, Berto saw. A tazer, the kind women kept in purses - or, in Carlie's case, jackets. Lance tossed it away. It hit the catwalk floor near Berto, skidded a bit, and went over the edge. Berto heard a clank, but figured it was just the tazer hitting one of the girders on its way down. He looked over the catwalk anyway.

The tazer was resting on a girder not two feet from the catwalk's edge.

"Y'all need to leave this nonsense to the professionals," Lance said, loud enough for both of them to hear.

Berto was inclined to agree, but Carlie's spine stiffened and she said just as loudly, "I _am_ a professional. I'm Ethan Raptor's manager!"

And then she _moved_, too fast for Berto to see any details in the darkness, and somehow Lance, who outweighed her by a hundred pounds of villainy, was bent over wheezing and Carlie was sprinting down the catwalk, God bless her.

But Lance recovered just as quickly and took off after her. Berto weighed his chances of actually catching them and went instead for the tazer. His numb fingertips brushed the black plastic edge, but then he heard Kat yell something like, "Steel! _Catch!_" and Max yell, "Fire in the hole!"

An explosion, out over the river where nothing could be damaged, lit up the night and the entire bridge shook. And the tazer jittered its way another foot away from the catwalk.

"Thanks a bunch, _hermano_," Berto muttered. Of _course_ his teammates would set off the bajillion tons of plastic explosives. He edged out onto the girder, praying Max didn't blow anything else up while he was out there.

Lance, meanwhile, had grabbed Carlie, and was now hauling her back to Berto's position. "That's about _enough_! I don't have time for this if I'm gonna make my big escape, and you two are _not_ gonna be the reason I wind up back in Leavenworth!"

Carlie looked around, desperate, and met Berto's eyes through the steel bars of the catwalk. It was a bad vantage point, but he could see everything quite clearly indeed: If he didn't get that tazer, they were done for, and he couldn't get the tazer if Lance was back on the job.

_Do something_, he pleaded silently. _Read my mind and do something to_ stall him

Understanding miraculously flashed across her face, and then, just as quickly, vanish into a truly Oscar-worthy performance. For the Academy's consideration - Carlie Hoffman as Hysterical Victim.

"Oh my God, no," she cried, bursting into tears, and collapsed onto the catwalk, forcing Lance to stoop - and turn his back to what Berto was doing - in order to keep his grip on her. "No no no! Don't kill me, please, oh _God_ -"

"Stop whinin' and get up," Lance barked.

Berto took a deep breath and stretched further, fingers closing haphazardly around the tazer even as Carlie shrieked in apparent panic.

"I don't want to die, please, no, _you can't do this_!"

Lance slapped her across the face, knocking her glasses askew. "Shut up! Now get on your _feet_."

Still sobbing hysterically, Carlie got to her knees, but didn't go any further. Lance heaved an exasperated, frustrated sigh and started to turn around. "Berto, you better not be running away or-"

He cut himself off when Berto, now standing right behind him, pressed the twin metal prongs of the tazer into his beefy neck.

"Good night, Lance," he said, and depressed the button. Fifty thousand volts of electricity hit Lance's nervous system; his eyes rolled back in his head and, as soon as Berto took the tazer away, he dropped to the catwalk like his strings had been cut.

There was a moment of silence broken only by the roar of traffic and wind, and then Berto looked up at Carlie. "Are you okay?"

He got his answer when she practically knocked him down, flinging her arms around him and kissing him full on the mouth. "Berto! That was_ brilliant_!"

Berto blinked at her, absolutely floored - but in a very nice way. Very, very nice. "I - uh - I... I tried my best?"

"Well, it was perfect," she said, drawing back and giving Lance a disdainful glance.

"Not quite. I couldn't have done it without your help," he said, and he sincerely meant it.

She smiled back, but further conversation was forestalled when Max's voice came echoing down the catwalk: "Berto! Everything all right?"

"Just fine," Berto said as he approached.

Better than Max, in fact, who was breathing hard and looked slightly fatigued. He raised his arm so Berto could see the biolink display, which was flashing red warnings about lack of transphasic energy. "Good, 'cause I kinda need -" Max broke himself off with a slightly belated, "Uh, Carlie. Hi. Having fun?"

"A blast," she said, then started to laugh at her own bad pun. Berto followed her lead and Max just looked at them like they were crazy, then shook his head and knelt to check out Lance's still very unconscious form - and to slap a pair of N-Tek's finest handcuffs around his wrists.

"Lance Breamer? Since when is _he_ out of prison?" Max finished his examination and stood, giving Berto a freshly appreciative glance. "Nice work, bro. Kat is here too, but I... I mean, _we_ left Josh back at the van."

"Is she okay?" Berto asked, more for Carlie's sake than Kat's. Max would have told him immediately if anything was amiss.

Max nodded. "She's okay. Well, not her ear, but that's a long story."

"Ours is too. And _you_ still owe me food. I want dinner, Martinez." Carlie slid an arm around his waist and poked him rather sharply in the ribs for emphasis, but he made no move to get away, rib-poking and all.

Now that the "staring death in the face" part was over, he was actually feeling quite cheerful about the world and his place in it. Nothing like a little adventure to set a person straight. "That reminds me - the 'Taste of Bridge Day' festival starts tomorrow. I bet they'll have_ something_ without gravy."

Max rolled his eyes, then bent down and slung Lance over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. "Oof. Yeah, _way_ too much gravy for him." He checked his biolink again and winced, but sucked it up and started trudging towards the exit. "Let's get out of here and get some _rest_, huh?"

"Now there," Berto said, "is a plan that makes sense."


	12. Epilogue: Water Under The Bridge

Notes: A mountain-sized thanks to my reviewers! I hope you had as much fun reading this as I had writing it. So, with no further ado, let's wrap this sucker up. Montani semper liberi!

* * *

_"- a beautiful day from here on the New River Gorge Bridge, just outside of Fayetteville, West Virginia, and the site of the annual Bridge Day BASE jumping event. LiveSport is proud to be bringing you the exclusive broadcast of this decades-old extreme sports festival. Among the four hundred jumpers this year are several notable extreme athletes which regular viewers will recognize, including Team Raptor's Trip Thompson, and Team Steel's Josh McGrath and Kat Ryan."_

"All of that and they _still_ get top billing. Those _punks_," Josh said through slightly clenched teeth, glaring at the small but crystal-clear image of Orrin Carter on Berto's handheld TV. The real live Orrin was broadcasting from on top of the LiveSport bus, which was parked not too far away, in the exact center of the bridge's span. Additional footage was being provided by a cameraman suspended over the river by the quite unsightly crane parked next to the bus.

"_Excusez-moi_?" Carlie asked, raising her eyebrows.

"Present company excluded, of course," Kat said, saving Josh the trouble. Carlie had somehow become permanently attached to Berto's side. She'd been there when Max had found them on the bridge, and she'd been there when Berto had dragged his teammates along to the Taste of Bridge Day festival - all nine high-cholesterol hours of it - and she'd been there, cheerfully knocking at the van door, when Josh and Kat had gotten up that morning to pack their parachutes, and she was still there now, holding Berto's arm and leaning over his shoulder.

It was amusing, but even _more_ amusing because Berto was so obviously pleased about it. Josh and Kat, over the course of parachute-packing, had already agreed on their strategy: As soon as they got on the road again, they were going to tease Berto to death, without pause, without mercy.

Maybe even before then. It was only fair - _they'd_ had the vacation from hell, while _he'd_ not only saved the day but also got the girl. There was a balance to these things that had to be worked out. By heckling, if necessary.

Making an obvious bid to keep the peace, Berto now switched channels to the twenty-four-hour headline news, where the top story continued to be the bizarre arrest of wanted fugitive Lance Breamer, along with six of his best militia buddies. The Fayetteville paper had made a big fuss over it that morning too - although it wasn't sufficiently interesting to displace the giant, full-color front-page Bridge Day extravaganza.

The part that had really grabbed everyone's attention was that Lance and his crew had been found on the steps of the Fayetteville police headquarters, in the middle of the night, handcuffed and, in Lance's case, ever-so-delicately scorched. It further turned out that in his spare time one of the militia boys was, incredibly, a New River Gorge park ranger, which explained how they were able to gain access to the bridge in the first place.

But the police had no clue how they'd gotten to the jail, and Josh, reading between the lines of the newspaper story, thought that they weren't especially anxious to find out. Lance was a bad guy, and now he was headed back to jail, and since justice was served, who cared?

No mention had been made of explosives or plots to blow the bridge sky-high, by the militia or by the authorities, and Team Steel (plus Carlie) had minded their business and not said a word. Max and Berto had taken care of the bombs before depositing Lance and friends; and Max in particular felt that there was no reason to postpone a perfectly good BASE-jumping extravaganza just for the teensy matter of public safety.

Currently the news was showing a clip of Lance being remanded into federal custody. The camera that shot the footage was the jumpiest that Josh had seen in quite a while. That didn't make it any less satisfying to watch.

"_Montani semper liberi!_" Lance shouted, fighting the cops and feds even as they shoved him into a prison transport van - armored, it looked like. The words were tinny and twice-distorted by broadcasting, but unmistakable.

"What's _that_ mean?" Carlie asked.

Berto sighed and translated. " 'Mountaineers are always free.' "

"In other words, we haven't seen the last of him." Josh finished adjusting his helmet and gave Berto a thumbs-up. "Or us. We're up, bro. Wish us luck."

"We'll be back in, oh, about fifteen minutes," Kat added. Her helmet was firmly in place too, despite the still-tender ear, which had turned a lovely yellow-brown-green in the last day. The night of big excitement, after everything was over, Josh had plugged into the regenerator and Kat, applying generous amounts of ice to her wounded skull, had kept him company - if a steady stream of complaints and vindictives and phone calls to Trip could be called "company."

Trip was somewhere else on the bridge, placating Ethan, who was entering the fourth hour of his protest whine to the Bridge Day officials. Josh did not care; he was out of earshot.

"Have fun! And be _careful!_" Carlie called, waving to them as they moved off.

"Now we've got a mom for real," Kat said to Josh in an undertone, but she had a half-grin on her face.

Josh grinned back. They'd been calling Berto "Mom" for so long that he was actually starting to answer to it. "Like I need someone else to call 'Dad'."

They reached the stairs that led to the platform and were forced to pause as the officials went over their gear one last time. It had already been checked by officials when they arrived on the bridge, and of course Josh had taken care to pack it right in the first place, but this was definitely an occasion when it was better to be safe than sorry. Besides, they were still sort of in trouble for not being at the orientation meeting, despite's Jefferson's string-pulling on that matter.

"You never know," Kat said as an official examined her backpack rig. "He could be the dad that lets you stay up late and eat dessert before dinner and stuff. Third time's the charm, right?"

"Actually, I think I've done okay the first two times." And he had. He didn't remember his biological father, not really; what vague shreds of memory he did have were full of love. His adoptive father was just as good as the real thing. Jefferson certainly acted like the real thing.

He'd called late the night before and given Josh the riot act from three thousand miles away, but after that he'd said that he was proud of Josh for sticking his neck out to help someone like Ethan. The call had ended with a pleasant chat about how the inside of a coal mine and the underside of a bridge looked, and a stern admonition to never, ever, _ever_ do anything like that again. Ever.

The officials concluded their examination and waved them on. The cameraman suspended over the river swung around in this cherrypicker basket to get them in his lens while Josh climbed up the short stairs and stepped onto the platform. It looked more like the plank on a pirate's ship - just a couple of boards sticking out into the air.

The thrill of adrenaline that hit him was immediate and strong. After all the adventure and mind-numbing boredom, this was it. They were jumping, and even if John Dread himself had beamed down onto the bridge right at that very moment, Josh wouldn'tve turned away. "You ready, Ryan?"

"Team Steel is _go_!" Kat announced, a devil's gleam in her eyes, and then launched into a series of flawless backflips down her platform.

The crowd shouted and cheered its approval. Not to be outdone, Josh waited a beat and then sprinted, flat out, down his platform and _dove_ headfirst off of the edge as if it was nothing more than a really high diving board. The crowd liked that, too, but their shouts were instantly lost in the wind that roared against him.

There wasn't anything in the world like freefall. It was a rush for even the most seasoned action junkie, and the fact that he only had eight-point-eight seconds until he smacked into the ground made it even better.

After seven seconds, you had about a fifty-fifty chance of surving impact. Josh was extreme, but he wasn't _that_ crazy, so he counted to five and then opened his 'chute. It caught the wind immediately and filled, jerking him upright and slowing his plunge considerably. He looked up and caught sight of Kat right above him, parachute open and no problems visible.

The parachutes boasted eye-searing stripes of aqua and green and were dominated by an oversize N-Tek logo. "N-TEK" was printed along one edge in foot-tall letters. Jefferson was taking no chances with this publicity opportunity.

Berto, wearing a slim silver communicator in lieu of the full biolink gear, buzzed in Josh's ear along with the background roar of 250,000 people: "Looks like fun, but I'm glad I'm up here."

"I'm sure Carlie's glad you're up there, too," he said back, guiding the parachute down to the gravel-and-mud clearing on the right-hand side of the riverbank, where a smaller crowd was waiting. There was a big white circle painted on the ground, and he was intent on hitting it dead center.

"Uh, yeah," Berto said, and Josh could practically hear him turning red. "There _is_ that."

Then the ground was rushing up and Josh prepared to land. It was perfect, of course, and he gathered up the chute and got out of the way as fast as possible so Kat could land. There'd be the devil to pay if he screwed up her own perfect landing.

She landed and was wadding up her chute almost before her feet hit the ground. "Let's go - the truck is about to leave."

The truck was a shiny new pickup with mud spattered all over its sides. It was one of several vehicles that were ferrying the jumpers up to the bridge from the DZ - along the same road that Lance had used two nights prior. Five jumpers were already in the cargo area, and the driver was gesturing impatiently for Josh and Kat to hurry. If they missed it, they'd have to wait for some time, and Josh had no intention of doing _that_. He started jogging. "Berto, you have the other parachutes, right?"

It was easier to pack a bunch of parachutes than repack the same one over and over again. Unfortunately convenience meant that someone had to hold onto them in between jumps - but that was why Team Steel came with a manager. And a manager's girlfriend, now.

"Carlie's watching them," came the reply, practically daring him to comment. "Orrin just nominated you both for 'play of the day'."

Josh ducked his head so that the other jumpers in the truck couldn't see him talking to thin air. "We're heading back up, and then we'll give him something _else_ to talk about."

The jolting ride up the mountainside was amiable enough, despite the steadily increasing chill in the air. The other jumpers laughed, joked, and traded stories about their wildest jumps; two of them recognized Josh and Kat from the TV coverage of the DOX and struck up a conversation about Del Oro Bay's premiere extreme sporting event.

Team Steel managed to jump two more times before Bridge Day was over. The second time was with Trip, whose ankle had apparently healed faster than Kat's ear, and the last time was barely squeezed in under the deadline. In fact, and through no planning of their own, they were the final jumpers of the day.

The excitement was still there, but the urge to perform a wild jump wasn't, and they simply stepped up to the edge of the platform, exchanged a high-five, and jumped. Josh threw his pilot chute immediately, wanting to get the full experience this time, but Kat held out for a bit longer.

When she did open her chute, she didn't steer towards the landing area. Instead, she held steady over the middle of the river. Josh watched her splash down and surface, snatched out of the water by the people in the rescue boats almost as soon as she hit. A dangerous stunt - she could've easily drowned - and a stupid one, because the officials would be even more upset with them.

He landed - on _land_, thank you - at roughly the same time the boat carrying her made it to shore. "Hey, Kat!" he called to her. "You haven't had enough cold water on this trip or what?"

She climbed out of the boat soaking wet and laughing. "Don't knock it 'till you try it, McGrath."

"Yeah," he said, trudging toward their next designated ride back up the mountain. "Think I'll wait for next year, though."

She nodded, sending water droplets flying. "We are _so_ doing this part again. None of that other mess, though."

He rolled his eyes at the mere _thought_ of a repeat journey. "No argument here."

They made it back up to the bridge with no trouble and played nice with the tourists for a while, signing autographs and answering questions and just generally being minor celebs, then packed it in and went back to the hotel parking lot when the bridge opened up to vehicular traffic again. Berto greeted them at the van - _sans_ Ms. Hoffman, for once, and checking the underside of the van for damage and/or suspicious objects before their departure the next morning.

Josh took the opportunity to heckle him. "Hey, bro. Where's Carlie?"

"Team Raptor left already," he said, rather stiffly.

Kat feigned curiosity. "Is that right? Hmm."

Berto stood and brushed his hands off, evidently not willing to dignify that with a response. Josh tried again. "Gee, Kat, why do I get the feeling that a lot of Team Steel-Team Raptor co-appearances are in our future?"

"It _would_ be good publicity," Berto said in a half-hearted attempt at defense. Josh and Kat gave him twin unfooled looks and he quickly changed the subject to, "How was the jump?"

"Fantastic," Kat said. "Josh chickened out and stayed dry."

"Hey, you never consulted me on the water landing," he countered, but the argument was good-natured, and they headed towards the van door in high spirits.

Orrin, cameraman trailing along behind him and looking a little wilted by the long day, caught them before they could get there. "Just a quick one, folks," he said, forestalling any objections. "It's been a busy couple of days, and believe me, I'm done too."

"Fire away," Josh told him. Orrin was a nice guy. They could make time for him, even if the idea of kicking back and chilling was starting to sound really attractive.

Orrin gestured to his cameraman and looked professional. "Team Steel had not one, not two, but _three_ amazing jumps today. This is a non-competative event, but you weren't holding anything back."

Kat pushed her damp hair out her eyes and made a _tsk_ing noise of rebuke. "That's so not our style."

The reporter nodded appreciatively and turned the microphone on Josh. "What about you, McGrath? Any thoughts on Bridge Day or West Virginia?

Josh glanced at Kat, and Berto, and gave Orrin a shrug and a smile. "What can I say? Wild and wonderful."


End file.
